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THE CUSTOM HOUSE 

AND 

MAIN STREET 

BY 

/ 

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

'J 

WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 




HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND CO.MPA]!s'Y 

Boston : 4 Park Street ; New York : 11 East Seventeenth Street 
Chicago ; 378-388 Wabash Avenue 

(iarfjE 0iVJcrpide {Sress, Cambridge 



n 



TWO COPIES RECEIVED, 

Library of COBgraa^i 
Office of the 

FEB 6 -1900 

Register of Gopyrlgh^^ 



55883 

Copyright, 1899, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

All rights reserved. 



85C0ND COPY, 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. 



I 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 



When Hawthorne collected a number of fugitive 
pieces under the title of 3Iosses from an Old Manse^ 
he justified the name he gave his book by a delightful 
introductory sketch of the old manse itself, in which 
he was then living at Concord. In this sketch, this 
most reserved and shy of writers followed a practice 
which seems almost incidental to shyness, — he wrote 
with an apparent candor and unreserve about his per- 
sonal affairs ; he was like a person talking in the twi- 
light, and finding courage to say things on which he 
would be silent if candles were suddenly brought in. 
But the reader looking closely will note that the con- 
fidences are really of the most external sort ; there is 
no intimate revelation of his nature, — he talks only 
of the house he lives in, and of the neighborhood 
which he has happened on. 

Later in life, Hawthorne used something of the 
same manner when introducing his bundle of sketches 
of England in the volume Our Old Home. His 
paper on " A Consular Experience " likewise is a 
frank talk behind the door with his reader, but is in 
effect a series of humorous studies of character in 
which this silent man indulged. Between these two 
personal, lightly autobiographical disclosures was a 
third, which perhaps has been even more read, for it 
stands at the entrance of his most famous book, The 
Scarlet Letter. 

In this graceful sketch of " The Custom House,'* 



iv INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 

Hawthorne ostensibly was paving the way for a ficti- 
tious explanation of the origin of his great piece of 
fiction ; but it may be suspected that the part of the 
sketch which related to the discovery of a dusty bun- 
dle of papers from the files of Mr. Secretary Pue was 
an afterthought, written perhaps when he was casting 
about for some ingenious mode of accounting for the 
facts on which he had built. The sketch is in reality, 
like the others, a bit of autobiograiDhic writing upon 
a theme in which he might, without offence to his pri- 
vacy, invite his friends and neighbors to share. 

He held the appointment of Surveyor of the Port 
of Salem for three years. He was to take this posi- 
tion when he wrote " The Old Manse ; " and when he 
left the Custom House, as he hints in this sketch, it 
was with a sense of continuity in his life, which was 
at bottom the life of a writer. He meant, as he says, 
to collect a number of his scattered pieces, as he did 
when he left the Manse, and this sketch was to intro- 
duce them all, but he left it finally as introduction 
only to The Scarlet Letter. There is a whimsical 
allusion in the last sentence to an earlier, playful 
sketch, " A Eill from the Town Pump." 

If he had made the collection, "Main Street" 
would have been one of the most natural members. 
It is redolent of the same atmosphere as The Scarlet 
Letter^ and is indeed a sort of panoramic sketch of 
New England history. When the sjsetch was written, 
the panorama, a long painted roll of successive scenes, 
suggested perhaps by the landscape paper which deco- 
rated the walls of stately houses, was a favorite show 
in New England. Banvard's Panorama of the Mis- 
sissippi, for instance, was a very popular entertain- 
ment, and Longfellow owed to it such knowledge as 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE. V 

he had for the scenes visited by Evangeline in her 
journey in search of Basil. So Hawthorne makes an 
imaginary panorama of Main Street in Salem, and 
provides it with the regular accompaniment of a show- 
man. 

Both of these sketches are very characteristic of 
Hawthorne's attitude toward his birthplace. In the 
former he catches the contemporary life, which he 
regarded almost as if he were one of a later genera- 
tion looking back upon the Salem of his day ; in the 
latter he reproduces the historic life of New England 
almost as if he were a contemporary. With all his 
apparent remoteness ^from life as he went his way 
silent, reserved, shut within himself, Hawthorne had 
the eye that penetrates and the memory that holds 
fast ; his note-books bear witness to the closeness of 
his observation of the life about him. And, w^ith 
all this minuteness of scrutiny and this fidelity to 
nature, there was nothing slavish about his copying 
of life. He had the constructive imagination which 
enabled him to record the figures in the Custom 
House so that they will ahvays be interesting, and to 
vivify the dry records of a provincial history so that 
one sees the procession dow^n Main Street as if he 
were looking at the pictures thrown by some magic 
lantern. 

H. E. S. 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 



INTRODUCTORY TO "THE SCARLET LETTER." 

It is a little remarkable, that — though disinclined 
to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fire- 
side, and to my personal friends — an autobiograph- 
ical impulse should twice in my life have taken 
possession of me, in addressing the public. The first 
time was three or four years since, when I favored the 
reader — inexcusably, and for no earthly reason, that 
either the indulgent reader or the intrusive author 
could imagine — with a description of my way of life 
in the deep quietude of an Old Manse. And now — 
because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough to 
find a listener or two on the former occasion — I again 
seize the pubhc by the button, and talk of my three 
years' experience in a Custom House. The example 
of the famous "P. P., Clerk of this Parish," was 
never more faithfully followed. The truth seems to 
be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth upon 
the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will 
fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few 
who will understand him, better than most of his 
schoolmates or lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do 
far more than this, and indulge themselves in such 



2 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be 
addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and 
mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, 
thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to 
find out the divided segment of the wi'iter's own na= 
tore, and complete his circle of existence by bringing 
him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, 
however, to speak all, even where we speak imperson- 
ally. But, as thoughts are frozen and utterance be- 
numbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation 
with his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine 
that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the 
closest friend, is listening to our talk ; and then, a na- 
tive reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, 
we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, 
and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me be- 
hind its veil. To this extent, and within these limits, 
an author, methinks, may be autobiographical, without 
violating either the reader's rights or his own. 

It will be seen likewise, that this Custom House 
sketch has a certain propriety, of a Idnd always recog- 
nized in literature, as explaining how a large portion 
of the following pages came into my possession, and 
as offering proofs of the authenticity of a narrative 
therein contained. This, in fact, — a desire to put 
myself in my true position as editor, or very little 
more, of the most prolix among the tales that make up 
my volume, — this, and no other is my true reason for 
assuming a personal relation with the public. In ac- 
complishing the main purpose, it has appeared allow- 
able, by a few extra touches, to give a faint represen- 
tation of a mode of life not heretofore described, 
together with some of the characters that move in it, 
among whom the author happened to make one. 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE, 3 

In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, 
half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, 
was a bustling wharf, — but which is now burdened 
with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or 
no symptoms of commercial life ; except, perhaps, a 
bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, 
discharging hides ; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia 
schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood, — at the 
head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide 
often overflows, and along which, at the base and in 
the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many lan- 
guid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass, — 
here, with a view from its front windows adown this 
not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the 
harbor, stands a spacious edifice of brick. From the 
loftiest point of its roof, during precisely three and a 
half hours of each forenoon, floats or droops, in breeze 
or calm, the banner of the republic ; but with the thir- 
teen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, 
and thus indicating that a civil, and not a military 
post of Uncle Sam's government is here established. 
Its front is ornamented with a portico of half a dozen 
wooden piUars, supporting a balcony, beneath which 
a flight of wide granite steps descends towards the 
street. Over the entrance hovers an enormous speci- 
men of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a 
shield before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a 
bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows 
in each claw. With the customary infirmity of tem- 
per that characterizes this unhappy fowl, she appears, 
by the fierceness of her beak and eye, and the general 
truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the 
inoffensive community ; and especially to warn all cit- 
izens, carefid of their safety, against intruding on the 



4 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

premises which she overshadows with her wings. 
Nevertheless, vixenly as she looks, many people . are 
seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves 
imder the wing of the federal eagle ; imagining, I pre- 
sume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness 
of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great tender- 
ness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later, — 
of tener soon than late, — is apt to fling off her nest- 
lings, with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or 
a rankling wound from her barbed arrows. 

The pavement round about the above-described ed- 
ifice — which we may as well. name at once as the 
Custom House of the port — has grass enough growing 
in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been 
worn by any multitudinous resort of business. In 
some months of the year, however, there often chances 
a forenoon when affairs move onward with a livelier 
tread. Such occasions might remind the elderly citizen 
of that period before the last war with England, when 
Salem was a port by itself ; not scorned, as she is now, 
by her own merchants and ship-owners, who permit 
her wharves to crumble to ruin, while their ventures 
go to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty 
flood of commerce at New York or Boston. On some 
such morning, when three or four vessels happen to 
have arrived at once, — usually from Africa or South 
America, — or to be on the verge of their departure 
thitherward, there is a sound of frequent feet, passing 
briskly up and down the granite steps. Here, before 
his own wife has greeted him, you may greet the sea- 
flushed shipmaster, just in port, with his vessel's 
papers under liis arm, in a tarnished tin box. Here, 
too, comes his owner, cheerful or sombre, gracious or 
in the sulksj accordingly as his scheme of the now 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 6 

accomplished voyage has been realized in merchandise 
that will readily be turned to gold, or has buried him 
under a bulk of incommodities, such as nobody will 
care to rid him of. Here, likewise, — the germ of the 
wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded, care-worn merchant, 
— we have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste 
of traffic as a wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends 
adventures in his master's ships, when he had better 
be sailing mimic -boats upon a mill-pond. Another 
figure in the scene is the outward-bound sailor in quest 
of a protection ; or the recently arrived one, pale and 
feeble, seeking a passport to the hospital. Nor must 
we forget the captains of the rusty little schooners 
that bring firewood from the British provinces; a 
rough-looking set of tarpaulins, without the alertness 
of the Yankee aspect, but contributing an item of no 
slight importance to our decaying trade. 

Cluster ail these individuals together, as they some- 
times were, with other miscellaneous ones to diversify 
the group, and, for the time being, it made the Cus- 
tom House a stirring scene. More frequently, how- 
ever, on ascending the steps, you would discern — in 
the entry, if it were summer time, or in their appro- 
priate rooms, if wintry or inclement weather — a row 
of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, 
which were tipped on their hind legs back against the 
wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally 
might be heard talking together, in voices between 
speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that 
distinguishes the occupants of almshouses, and aU 
other human beings who depend for subsistence on 
charity, on monopolized labor, or anything else, but 
their own independent exertions. These old gentle- 
men — seated, like Matthew, at the receipt of customs, 



6 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

but not very liable to be summoned thence, like Mm, 
for apostolic errands — were Custom House officers. 

Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the 
front door, is a certain room or office, about fifteen 
feet square, and of a lofty height; with two of its 
arched windows commanding a view of the aforesaid 
dilapidated wharf, and the third looking across a nar- 
row lane, and along a portion of Derby Street. All 
three give glimpses of the shops of grocers, block- 
makers, slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers ; around the 
doors of which are generally to be seen, laughing and 
gossiping, clusters of old salts, and such other wharf- 
rats as haunt the Wapping of a seaport. The room 
itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint; its 
floor is strewn with gray sand, in a fashion that has 
elsewhere fallen into long disuse ; and it is easj^ to 
conclude, from the general slovenliness of the place, 
that this is a sanctuary into which womankind, ^vith 
her tools of magic, the broom and mop, has very infre- 
quent access. In the way of furniture, there is a 
stove with a voluminous funnel; an old pine desk, 
with a three-legged stool beside it; two or three 
wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit and in- 
firm ; and — not to forget the library — on some 
shelves, a score or two of volumes of the Acts of Con- 
gress, and a bulky Digest of the Kevenue Laws. A 
tin pipe ascends through the ceiling, and forms a 
medium of vocal communication with other parts of 
the edifice. And here, some six months ago, — pacing 
from corner to corner, or lounging on the long-legged 
stool, with his elbow on the desk, and his eyes wan- 
dering up and down the column^ of the morning news- 
paper, — you might have recognized, honored reader, 
the same individual who welcomed you into his cheery 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. T 

little study, where the simsliine glimmered so pleas- 
antly through the willow branches, on the western 
side of the Old Manse. But now, should you go 
thither to seek him, you would inquire in vain for the 
Locofoco Surveyor. The besom of reform has swept 
him out of office ; and a worthier successor wears his 
dignity, and pockets his emoluments. 

This old town of Salem — my native place, though 
I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and 
maturer years — possesses, or did possess, a hold on 
my affections, the force of which I have never realized 
during my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, 
so far as its physical aspect is concerned, with its fiat, 
unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, 
few or none of which pretend to architectural beauty, 
— its irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor 
quaint, but only tame, — its long and lazy street 
lounging wearisomely through the whole extent of the 
peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one 
end, and a view of the almshouse at the other, — such 
being the features of my native town, it would be quite 
as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a 
disarranged checker-board. And yet, though invari- 
ably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling 
for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I 
must be content to call affection. The sentiment is 
probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which 
my family has struck into the soil. It is now nearly 
two centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, 
the earliest emigrant of my name, made his appear- 
ance in the wild and forest-bordered settlement, which 
has since become a city. And here his descendants 
have been born and died, and have mingled their 
earthly substance with the soil, until no smaD portion 



8 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame 
wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In 
part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is 
the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of 
my countrymen can know what it is ; nor, as frequent 
transportation is perhaps better for the stock, need 
they consider it desirable to know. 

But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. 
The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family 
tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present 
to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can remem- 
ber. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home- 
feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in refer- 
ence to the present phase of the town. I seem to have 
a stronger claim to a residence here on account of his 
grave, bearded, sabled-cloaked and steeple-crowned pro- 
genitor, — who came so early, with his Bible and his 
sword, and trode the unworn street with such a stately 
port, and made so large a figure, as a man of war and 
peace, — a stronger claim than for myself, whose name 
is seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was 
a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the 
Church ; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good 
and evil. He was likewise a bitter persecutor, as wit- 
ness the Quakers, who have remembered him in their 
histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity 
towards a woman of their sect, which will last longer, 
it is to be feared, than any record of his better deeds, 
although these were many. His son, too, inherited 
the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicu- 
ous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood 
may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. So 
deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry bones, in the 
Charter Street burial-ground, must still retain it, if 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE, 9 

they have not crumbled utterly to dust ! I know not 
whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves 
to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruel- 
ties ; or whether they are now groaning under the 
heavy consequences of them, in another state of beingo 
At all events, I, the present writer, as their represen- 
tative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, 
and pray that any curse incurred by them — as I have 
heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition 
of the race, for many a long year back, would argue 
to exist — may be now and henceforth removed. 

Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black- 
browed Puritans would have thought it quite a suffi- 
cient retribution for his sins, that, after so long a 
lapse of years, the old trunk of the family tree, with 
so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, 
as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim, 
that I have ever cherished, would they recognize as 
laudable ; no success of mine — if my life, beyond its 
domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success 
— would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not 
positively disgraceful. "• What is he ? " murmurs one 
gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. "A 
writer of story-books ! What kind of a business in 
life, — what mode of glorifying God, or being service- 
able to mankind in his day and generation, — may 
that be ? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well 
have been a fiddler ! " Such are the compliments ban- 
died between my great-grandsires and myself, across 
the gulf of time ! And yet, let them scorn me as they 
will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined 
themselves with mine. 

Planted deep, in the town's earliest infancy and 
childhood, by these two earnest and energetic men, 



10 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

the race has ever since subsisted here ; always, too, in 
respectability ; never, so far as I have known, dis- 
graced by a single unworthy member ; but seldom or 
never, on the other hand, after the first two genera- 
tions, performing any memorable deed, or so much as 
putting forward a claim to public notice. Gradually, 
they have sunk almost out of sight; as old houses, 
here and there about the streets, get covered half-way 
to the eaves by the accumulation of new soil. From 
father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed 
the sea ; a gray-headed shipmaster, in each generation, 
retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while 
a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the 
mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale, which 
had blustered against his sire and grandsire. The 
boy, also, in due time, passed from the forecastle to 
the cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned 
from his world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and 
mingle his dust with the natal earth. This long con- 
nection of a family with one spot, as its place of birth 
and burial, creates a kindred between the human be- 
ing and the locality, quite independent of any charm 
in the scenery or moral circumstances that surround 
him. It is not love, but instinct. The new inhabitant 
— who came himself from a foreign land, or whose 
father or grandfather came — has little claim to be 
called a Salemite ; he has no conception of the oyster- 
like tenacity with which an old settler, over whom his 
third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his 
successive generations have been imbedded. It is no 
matter that the place is joyless for him ; that he is 
weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and dust, 
the dead level of site and sentiment, the chill east 
wind, and the chillest of social atmospheres, — all 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 11 

these, and whatever faults besides he may see or im- 
agine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, 
and just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an 
earthly paradise. So has it been in my case. I felt 
it almost as a destiny to make Salem my home ; so 
that the mould of features and cast of character which 
had all along been familiar here, — ever, as one repre- 
sentative of the race lay down in his grave, another as- 
siuning, as it were, his sentry-march along the main 
street, — might still in my little day be seen and rec- 
ognized in the old town. Nevertheless, this very sen- 
timent is an evidence that the connection, which has 
become an unhealthy one, should at last be severed. 
Human nature will not flourish, any more than a po- 
tato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a 
series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My 
children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as 
their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike 
their roots into unaccustomed earth. 

On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly 
this strange, indolent, un joyous attachment for my na- 
tive town, that brought me to fill a place in Uncle 
Sam's brick edifice, when I might as well, or better, 
have gone somewhere else. My doom was on meo It 
was not the first time, nor the second, that I had gone 
away, — as it seemed, permanently, — but yet returned, 
like the bad half -penny ; or as if Salem were for me 
the inevitable centre of the universe. So, one fine 
morning, I ascended the flight of granite steps, with 
the President's commission in my pocket, and was in- 
troduced to the corps of gentlemen who were to aid 
me in my weighty responsibility, as chief executive 
officer of the Custom House. 

I doubt greatly — or, rather, I do not doubt at all 



12 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

— whether any public functionary of the United States, 
either in the civil or military line, has ever had such a 
patriarchal body of veterans under his orders as my- 
self. The whereabouts of the Oldest Inhabitant was 
at once settled, when I looked at them. For upwards 
of twenty years before this epoch, the independent po- 
sition of the Collector had kept the Salem Custom 
House out of the whirlpool of political vicissitude, 
which makes the tenure of office generally so fragile. 
A soldier, — New England's most distinguished sol- 
dier, — he stood firmly on the pedestal of his gallant 
services ; and, himself secure in the wise liberality of 
the successive administrations through which he had 
held office, he had been the safety of his subordinates 
in many an hour of danger and heartquake. General 
Miller was radically conservative ; a man over whose 
kindly nature habit had no slight influence ; attach- 
ing himself strongly to familiar faces, and with diffi- 
culty moved to change, even when change might have 
brought unquestionable improvement. Thus, on tak- 
ing charge of my department, I found few but aged 
men. They were ancient sea-captains, for the most 
part, who, after being tost on every sea, and standing 
up sturdily against life's tempestuous blast, had finally 
drifted into this quiet nook ; where, with little to dis- 
turb them, except the periodical terrors of a presiden- 
tial election, they one and all acquired a new lease of 
existence. Though by no means less liable than their 
fellow-men to age and infirmity, they had evidently 
some talisman or other that kept death at bay. Two 
or three of their number, as I was assured, being gouty 
and rheumatic, or perhaps bedridden, never dreamed 
of making their appearance at the Custom House dur- 
ing a large part of the year j but, after a torpid win- 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 13 

ter, would creep out into the warm sunshine of May or 
June, go lazily about what they termed duty, and, at 
their own leisure and convenience, betake themselves 
to bed again. I must plead guilty to the charge of ab- 
breviating the official breath of more than one of these 
venerable servants of the republic. They were allowed, 
on my representation, to rest from their arduous labors, 
and soon afterwards — as if their sole principle of life 
had been zeal for their country's service, as I verily 
believe it was — withdrew to a better world. It is a 
pious consolation to me, that, through my interference, 
a sufficient space was allowed them for repentance of 
the evil and corrupt practices into which, as a matter 
of course, every Custom House officer must be sup- 
posed to fall. Neither the front nor the back entrance 
of the Custom House opens on the road to Paradise. 

The greater part of my officers were Whigs. It 
was well for their venerable brotherhood that the new 
Surveyor was not a politician, and though a faithful 
Democrat in principle, neither received nor held his 
office with any reference to political services. Had it 
been otherwise, — had an active politician been put 
into this influential post, to assume the easy task of 
making head against a Whig Collector, whose infirmi- 
ties withheld him from the personal administration of 
his office, — hardly a man of the old corps would have 
drawn the breath of official life, within a month af- 
ter the exterminating angel had come up the Custom 
House steps. According to the received code in such 
matters, it would have been nothing short of duty, in 
a politician, to bring every one of those white heads 
under the axe of the guillotine. It was plain enough 
to discern that the old feUows dreaded some such dis- 
courtesy at my hands. It pained, and at the same 



14 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, 

time amused me, to behold the terrors that attended 
my advent ; to see a furrowed cheek, weather-beaten by 
half a century of storm, turn ashy pale at the glance 
of so harmless an individual as myself ; to detect, as 
one or another addressed me, the tremor of a voice, 
which, in long-past days, had been wont to bellov/ 
through a speaking-trumpet hoarsely enough to fright- 
en Boreas himself to silence. They knew, these excel- 
lent old persons, that, by all established rule, — and, 
as regarded some of them, weighed by their own lack 
of efficiency for business, — they ought to have given 
place to younger men, more orthodox in politics, and 
altogether fitter than themselves to serve our common 
Uncle. I knew it too, but could never quite find in 
my heart to act upon the knowledge. Much and de- 
servedly to my own discredit, therefore, and consider- 
ably to the detriment of my official conscience, they 
continued, during my incumbency, to creep about the 
wharves, and loiter up and down the Custom House 
steps. They spent a good deal of time, also, asleep in 
their accustomed corners, with their chairs tilted back 
against the wall ; awaking, however, once or twice in 
a forenoon, to bore one another with the several thou- 
sandth repetition of old sea-stories, and mouldy jokes, 
that had grown to be passwords and countersigns 
among them. 

The discovery was soon made, I imagine, that the 
new Surveyor had no great harm in him. So, with 
lightsome hearts, and the happy consciousness of being 
usefully employed, — in their own behalf, at least, if 
not for our beloved country, — these good old gentle- 
men went through the various formalities of office. 
Sagaciously, under their spectacles, did they peep into 
the holds of vessels ! Mighty was their fuss about lit- 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 15 

tie matters, and marvellous, sometimes, the obtiiseness 
that allowed greater ones to slip between their fingers! 
Whenever such a mischance occurred, — when a wag- 
on-load of valuable merchandise had been smuggled 
ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath their 
unsuspicious noses, — nothing coidd exceed the vigi- 
lance and alacrity with which they proceeded to lock, 
and double-lock, and secure with tape and sealing-wax, 
all the avenues of the delinquent vessel. Instead of 
a reprimand for their previous negligence, the case 
seemed rather to require an eulogium on their praise- 
worthy caution, after the mischief had happened ; a 
grateful recognition of the promptitude of their zeal, 
the moment that there was no longer any remedy. 

Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable, 
it is my foolish habit to contract a kindness for them. 
The better part of my companion's character, if it have 
a better part, is that which usually comes uppermost 
in my regard, and forms the type whereby I recognize 
the man. As most of these old Custom House officers 
had good traits, and as my position in reference to 
them, being paternal and protective, was favorable to 
the growth of friendly sentiments, I soon grew to like 
them all. It was pleasant, in the summer forenoons, 
— when the fervent heat, that almost liquefied the rest 
of the human family, merely communicated a genial 
warmth to their half -torpid systems, — it was pleasant 
to hear them chatting in the back entry, a row of them 
all tipped against the wall, as usual ; while the frozen 
witticisms of past generations were thawed out, and 
came bubbling with laughter from their lips. Exter- 
nally, the jollity of aged men has much in common 
with the mirth of children ; the intellect, any more 
than a deep sense of humor, has little to do with the 



16 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

matter ; it is, with both, a gleam that plays upon the 
surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect alike 
to the green branch, and gray, mouldering trunk. In 
one case, however, it is real sunshine ; in the other, it 
more resembles the phosphorescent glow of decaying 
wood. 

It would be sad injustice, the reader must under- 
stand, to represent all my excellent old friends as in 
their dotage. In the first place, my coadjutors were 
not invariably old; there were men among them in 
their strength and prime, of marked ability and en- 
ergy, and altogether superior to the sluggish and de- 
pendent mode of life on which their evil stars had cast 
them. Then, moreover, the white locks of age were 
sometim.es found to be the thatch of an intellectual 
tenement in good repair. But, as respects the ma- 
jority of my corps of veterans, there wUl be no wrong 
done, if I characterize them generally as a set of 
wearisome old souls, who had gathered nothing worth 
preservation from their varied experience of life. 
They seemed to have flung away all the golden grain 
of practical wisdom, which they had enjoyed so many 
opportunities of harvesting, and most carefully to have 
stored their memories with the husks. They spoke 
with far more interest and unction of their morning's 
breakfast, or yesterday's, to-day's, or to-morrow's din- 
ner, than of the shipwreck of forty or fifty years ago, 
and all the world's wonders which they had witnessed 
with their youthful eyes. 

The father of the Custom House — the patriarch, 
not only of this little squad of officials, but, I am bold 
to say, of the respectable body of tide-waiters aU over 
the United States — was a certain permanent In- 
spector. He might truly be termed a legitimate son 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 17 

of the revenue system, dyed in the wool, or, rather, 
born in the purple ; since his sire, a Revolutionary 
colonel, and formerly collector of the port, had created 
an office for him, and appointed him to fill it, at a 
period of the early ages which few living men can now 
remember. This Inspector, when I first knew him, 
was a man of fourscore years, or thereabouts, and cer- 
tainly one of the most wonderful specimens of winter- 
green that you would be likely to discover in a life- 
time's search. With his florid cheek, his compact 
figure, smartly arrayed in a bright-buttoned blue coat, 
his brisk and vigorous step, and his hale and hearty 
aspect, altogether he seemed- — not young, indeed — 
but a kind of new contrivance of Mother Nature in 
the shape of man, whom age and infirmity had no 
business to touch. His voice and laugh, which per- 
petually reechoed through the Custom House, had 
nothing of the tremulous quaver and caclde of an old 
man's utterance ; they came strutting out of his lungs, 
like the crow of a cock, or the blast of a clarion. 
Looking at him merely as an animal, — and there was 
very little else to look at, — he was a most satisfactory 
object, from the thorough healthfulness and whole- 
someness of his system, and his capacity, at that ex- 
treme age, to enjoy all, or nearly all, the delights 
which he had ever aimed at, or conceived of. The 
careless security of his life in the Custom House, on a 
regular income, and with but slight and infrequent ap- 
prehensions of removal, had no doubt contributed to 
make time pass lightly over him. The original and 
more potent causes, however, lay in the rare perfection 
of his animal nature, the moderate proportion of in- 
tellect, and the very trifling admixture of moral and 
spiritual ingredients; these latter qualities, indeed. 



18 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

being in barely enough measure to keep the old gen- 
tleman from walking on all-fours. He possessed no 
power of thought, no depth of feeling, no troublesome 
sensibilities; nothing, in short, but a few common- 
place instincts, which, aided by the cheerful' temper 
that grew inevitably out of his physical well-being, 
did duty very respectably, and to general acceptance, 
in lieu of a heart. He had been the husband of three 
wives, all long since dead ; the father of twenty chil- 
dren, most of whom, at every age of childhood or 
maturity, had likewise returned to dust. Here, one 
would suppose, might have been sorrow enough to 
imbue the sunniest disposition, through and through, 
with a sable tinge. Not so with our old Inspector ! 
One brief sigh sufficed to carry off the entire burden 
of these dismal reminiscences. The next moment, he 
was as ready for sport as any unbreeched infant ; far 
readier than the Collector's junior clerk, who, at nine- 
teen years, was much the elder and graver man of the 
two. 

I used to watch and study this patriarchal person- 
age with, I think, livelier curiosity, than any other 
form of humanity there presented to my notice. He 
was, in truth, a rare phenomenon ; so perfect, in one 
point of view ; so shallow, so delusive, so impalpable, 
such an absolute nonenity, in every other. My con- 
clusion was that he had no soul, no heart, no mind ; 
nothing, as I have already said, but instincts ; and yet, 
withal, so cunningly had the few materials of his char- 
acter been put together, that there was no painful per- 
ception of deficiency, but, on my part, an entire con- 
tentment with what I found in him. It might be 
difficult — and it was so — to conceive how he should 
exist hereafter, so earthly and sensuous did he seem ; 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 19 

but surely his existence here, admitting that it was to 
terminate with his last breath, had been not unkindly 
given ; with no higher moral responsibilities than the 
beasts of the field, but with a larger scope of enjoy- 
ment than theirs, and with all their blessed immunity 
from the dreariness and duskiness of age. 

One point, in which he had vastly the advantage 
over his four-footed brethren, was his ability to recol- 
lect the good dinners which it had made no smaU por- 
tion of the happiness of his life to eat. His gour- 
mandism was a highly agreeable trait; and to hear 
him talk of roast meat was as appetizing as a pickle 
or an oyster. As he possessed no higher attribute, 
and neither sacrificed nor vitiated any spiritual en- 
dowment by devoting all his energies and ingenuities 
to subserve the delight and profit of his maw, it always 
pleased and satisfied me to hear him expatiate on fish, 
poultry, and butcher's meat, and the most eligible 
methods of preparing them for the table. His remi- 
niscences of good cheer, however ancient the date of 
the actual banquet, seemed to bring the savor of pig or 
tm'key under one's very nostrils. There were flavors 
on his palate, that had lingered there not less than 
sixty or seventy years, and were still apparently as 
fresh as that of the mutton-chop which he had just de- 
voured for his breakfast. I have heard him smack 
his lips over dinners, every guest at which, except 
himself, had long been food for worms. It was mar- 
vellous to observe how the ghosts of bygone meals 
were continually rising up before him ; not in anger 
or retribution, but as if grateful for his former appre- 
ciation and seeking to reduplicate an endless series of 
enjoyment, at once shadowy and sensual. A tender- 
loin of beef, a hindquarter of veal, a sparerib of pork. 



20 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

a particular chicken, or a remarkably praisewortliy 
turkey, which had perhaps adorned his board in the 
days of the elder Adams, would be remembered; 
while all the subsequent experience of our race, and 
all the events that brightened or darkened his indi- 
vidual career, had gone over him with as little perma- 
nent effect as the passing breeze. The chief tragic 
event of the old man's life, so far as I could judge, 
was his mishap with a certain goose which lived and 
died some twenty or forty years ago ; a goose of most 
promising figure, but which, at table, proved so invet- 
erately tough that the carving-knife would make no 
impression on its carcass, and it could only be divided 
with an axe and handsaw. 

But it is time to quit this sketch ; on w^liich, how- 
ever, I should be glad to dwell at considerably more 
length, because, of all men whom I have ever known, 
this individual was fittest to be a Custom House officer. 
Most persons, owing to causes which I may not have 
space to hint at, suffer moral detriment from this pe- 
cidiar mode of life. The old Inspector was incapable 
of it, and, were he to continue in office to the end of 
time, would be just as good as he was then, and sit 
down to dinner with just as good an appetite. 

There is one likeness, without wliich my gallery of 
Custom House portraits would be strangely incomplete ; 
but which my comparatively few opportunities for 
observation enable me to sketch only in the merest 
outline. It is that of the Collector, our gallant old 
General, who, after his brilliant military service, sub- 
sequently to wliich he had ruled over a wild Western 
territory, had come hither, twenty years before, to 
spend the decline of his varied and honorable life. 
The brave soldier had already numbered, nearly or 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 21 

quite, his threescore years and ten, and was pursuing 
the remainder of his earthly march, burdened with in- 
firmities which even the martial music of his own spirit- 
stirring recollections could do little towards lightening. 
The step was palsied now that had been foremost in 
the charge. It was only with the assistance of a servant, 
and by leaning his hand heavily on the iron balustrade, 
that he could slowly and painfidly ascend the Custom 
House steps, and, with a toilsome progress across the 
floor, attain his customary chair beside the fireplace. 
There he used to sit, gazing with a somewhat dim. se- 
renity of aspect at the figures that came and went ; 
amid the rustle of papers, the administering of oaths, 
the discussion of business, and the casual talk of the 
office ; all which sounds and circumstances seemed but 
indistinctly to impress his senses, and hardly to make 
their way into his inner sphere of contemplation. His 
countenance, in this repose, was mild and kindly. If 
his notice was sought, an expression of courtesy and 
interest gleamed out upon his features ; proving that 
there was light within him, and that it was only the 
outward medium of the intellectual lamp that ob- 
structed the rays in their passage. The closer you 
penetrated to the substance of his mind, the sounder 
it appeared. When no longer called upon to speak, 
or listen, either of which operations cost him an evi- 
dent effort, his face would briefly subside into its for- 
mer not uncheerful quietude. It was not painful to 
behold this look ; for, though dim, it had not the im- 
becility of decaying age. The framework of his na^ 
ture, originally strong and massive, was not yet crum- 
bled into ruin. 

To observe and define his character, however, imder 
such disadvantages, was as difficult a task as to trace 



22 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

out and build up anew, in imagination, an old fortress, 
like Ticonderoga, from a view of its gray and broken 
ruins. Here and there, perchance, the walls may re- 
main almost complete, but elsewhere may be only a 
shapeless mound, cumbrous with its very strength, and 
overgrown, through long years of peace and neglect, 
with grass and alien weeds. 

Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with affec- 
tion, — for, slight as was the communication between 
us, my feeling towards him, like that of all bipeds and 
quadrupeds who knew him, might not improperly be 
termed so, — I could discern the main points of his 
portrait. It was marked with the noble and heroic 
qualities which showed it to be not by a mere accident, 
but of good right, that he had won a distinguished 
name. His spirit could never, I conceive, have been 
characterized by an uneasy activity ; it must, at any 
period of his life, have required an impulse to set him 
in motion ; but, once stirred up, with obstacles to over- 
come, and an adequate object to be attained, it was 
not in the man to give out or fail. The heat that had 
formerly pervaded his nature, and which was not yet 
extinct, was never of the kind that flashes and flickers 
in a blaze ; but, rather, a deep, red glow, as of iron in 
a furnace. Weight, solidity, firmness; this was the 
expression of his repose, even in such decay as had 
crept untimely over him, at the period of wliich I 
speak. But I could imagine, even then, that under 
some excitement which should go deeply into his con- 
sciousness, — roused by a trumpet-peal loud enough to 
awaken all his energies that were not dead, but only 
slumbering, — he was yet capable of flinging off his 
infirmities like a sick man's gown, dropping the staff 
of age to seize a battle-sword, and starting up once 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 23 

more a warrior. And, in so intense a moment, his 
demeanor would have still been calm. Such an ex- 
hibition, however, was but to be pictured in fancy ; not 
to be anticipated, nor desired. What I saw in him — 
as evidently as the indestructible ramparts of Old 
Ticonderoga already cited as the most appropriate 
simile — were the features of stubborn and ponderous 
endurance, which might well have amounted to ob- 
stinacy in his earlier days; of integrity, that, like 
most of his other endowments, lay in a somewhat 
heavy mass, and was just as unmalleable and unman- 
ageable as a ton of iron ore ; and of benevolence, 
which, fiercely as he led the bayonets on at Chippewa 
or Fort Erie, I take to be of quite as genuine a stamp 
as what actuates any or all the polemical philanthro- 
pists of the age. He had slain men with his own 
hand for aught I know, — certainly they had fallen, 
like blades of grass at the sweep of the scythe, before 
the charge to which his spirit imparted its triumphant 
energy ; but, be that as it might, there was never in 
his heart so much cruelty as would have brushed the 
doAvn off a butterfly's wing. I have not known the 
man, to whose innate kindliness I would more confi- 
dently make an appeal. 

Many characteristics — and those, too, which con- 
tribute not the least forcibly to impart resemblance in 
a sketch — must have vanished, or been obscured, be- 
fore I met the General. All merely graceful attri- 
butes are usually the most evanescent ; nor does Na- 
ture adorn the human ruin with blossoms of new 
beauty that have their roots and proper nutriment only 
in the chinks and crevices of decay, as she sows wall- 
flowers over the ruined fortress of Ticonderoga. Still, 
even in respect of grace and beauty, there were points 



24 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

well worth noting. A ray of humor, now and then, 
would make its way through the veil of diui obstruc- 
tion, and glimmer pleasantly upon our faces. A trait 
of native elegance, seldom seen in the masculine char- 
acter after childhood or early youth, was shown in the 
General's fondness for the sight and fragrance of 
flowers. An old soldier might be supposed to prize 
only the bloody laurel on his brow ; but here was one 
who seemed to have a young girl's appreciation of the 
floral tribe. 

There, beside the fireplace, the brave old General 
used to sit ; while the Surveyor — though seldom, when 
it could be avoided, taking upon himself the difficult 
task of engaging him in conversation — was fond of 
standing at a distance, and watching his quiet and 
almost slumberous countenance. H6 seemed away 
from us, although we saw him but a few yards off ; 
remote, though we passed close beside his chair ; un- 
attainable, though we might have stretched forth our 
hands and touched his own. It might be that he lived 
a more real life within his thoughts than amid the un- 
appropriate environment of the Collector's office. The 
evolutions of the parade ; the tumult of the battle ; the 
flourish of old, heroic music, heard thirty years before, 
— such scenes and sounds, perhaps, were all alive be- 
fore his intellectual sense. Meanwhile, the merchants 
and shipmasters, the spruce clerks and uncouth sailors, 
entered and departed ; the bustle of this commercial 
and Custom House life kept up its little murmur round 
about him ; and neither with the men nor then- af- 
fairs did the General appear to sustain the most dis- 
tant relation. He was as much out of place as an old 
Bword — now rusty, but which had flashed once in the 
battle's front, and showed still a bright gleam along 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE, 25 

its blade — would have been, among the inkstands, 
paper - folders, and mahogany rulers, on the Deputy 
Collector's desk. 

There was one thing that much aided me in renew- 
ing and re-creating the stalwart soldier of the Niagara 
frontier, — the man of true and simple energy. It 
was the recollection of those memorable words of Ms, 
— "I '11 try, Sir ! " — spoken on the very verge of a 
desperate and heroic enterprise, and breathing the 
soul and spirit of New England hardihood, compre- 
hending all perils, and encountering all. If, in our 
country, valor were rewarded by heraldic honor, this 
phrase — which it seems so easy to speak, but which 
only he, with such a task of danger and glory before 
him, has ever spoken — would be the best and fittest 
of all mottoes for the General's shield of arms. 

It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and 
intellectual health, to be brought into habits of com- 
panionship with individuals unlike himself, who care 
little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities 
he must go out of himself to appreciate. The acci- 
dents of my life have often afforded me this advantage, 
but never with more fulness and variety than during 
my continuance in office. There was one man, espe- 
cially, the observation of whose character gave me a 
new idea of talent. His gifts were emphatically those 
of a man of business ; prompt, acute, clear-minded ; with 
an eye that saw through all perplexities, and a faculty 
of arrangement that made them vanish, as by the wav- 
ing of an enchanter's wand. Bred up from boyhood 
in the Custom House, it was his proper field of activ- 
ity ; and the many intricacies of business, so harassing 
to the interloper, presented themselves before him with 
the regularity of a perfectly comprehended system. In 



26 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

my contemplation, he stood as the ideal of his class. 
He was, indeed, the Custom House in himself , or, at 
all events, the mainspring that kept its variously re- 
volving wheels in motion ; for, in an institution like 
this, where its officers are appointed to subserve their 
own profit and convenience, and seldom with a lead- 
ing reference to their fitness for the duty to be per- 
formed, they must perforce seek elsewhere the dex- 
terity which is not in them. Thus, by an inevitable 
necessity, as a magnet attracts steel-filings, so did our 
man of business draw to himself the difficulties which 
everybody met with. With an easy condescension, and 
kind forbearance towards our stupidity, — which, to 
his order of mind, must have seemed little short of 
crime, — would he forthwith, by the merest touch of 
his finger, make the incomprehensible as clear as day- 
light. The merchants valued him not less than we, 
his esoteric friends. His integrity was perfect : it was 
a law of nature with him, rather than a choice or a 
principle ; nor can it be otherwise than the main con- 
dition of an intellect so remarkably clear and accurate 
as his, to be honest and regular in the administration 
of affairs. A stain on his conscience, as to anything 
that came witliin the range of his vocation, would 
trouble such a man very much in the same way, though 
to a far greater degree, than an error in the balance 
of an account, or an ink-blot on the fair page of a 
book of record. Here, in a word, — and it is a 
rare instance in my life, — I had met with a person 
thoroughly adapted to the situation which he held. 

Such were some of the people with whom I now 
found myself connected. I took it in good part, at the 
hands of Providence, that I was thrown into a position 
60 little akin to my past habits, and set myself serir 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE, 27 

ously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. 
After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes 
with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm ; after liv- 
ing for three years within the subtile influence of an 
intellect like Emerson's ; after those wild, free days 
on the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, be- 
side our fire of fallen boughs, with Ellery Channingj 
after talking with Thoreau about pine-trees and Indian 
relics, in his hermitage at Walden ; after growing fas- 
tidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of 
Hiliard's culture ; after becoming imbued with poetic 
sentiment at Longfellow's hearth-stone, — it was time, 
at length, that I should exercise other faculties of my 
nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had 
hitherto had little appetite. Even the old Inspector 
was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had 
known Alcott. I look upon it as an evidence, in some 
measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lack- 
ing no essential part of a thorough organization, that, 
with such associates to remember, I could mingle at 
once with men of altogether different qualities, and 
never murmur at the change. 

Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of 
little moment in my regard. I cared not, at this period, 
for books ; they were apart from me. Nature, — except 
it were human nature, — the nature that is developed 
in earth and sky, was, in one sense, hidden from me ; 
and all the imaginative delight, wherewith it had been 
spiritvialized, passed away out of my mind. A gift, a 
faculty if it had not departed, was suspended and in- 
animate within me. There would have been something 
sad, unutterably dreary, in all this, had I not been 
conscious that it lay at my own option to recall what- 
ever was valuable in the past. It might be true, ior 



28 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

deed, that this was a life which coiild not with impu- 
nity be lived too long; else, it might have made me 
permanently other than I had been without transform- 
ing me into any shape which it would be worth my 
while to take. But I never considered it as other than 
a transitory life. There was always a prophetic in- 
stinct, a low whisper in my ear, that, within no long 
period, and whenever a new change of custom should 
be essential to my good, a change would come. 

Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the Revenue, 
and, so far as I have been able to understand, as good 
a Surveyor as need be. A man of thought, fancy, and 
sensibility (had he ten times the Surveyor's propor- 
tion of those qualities) may, at any time, be a man 
of affairs, if he will only choose to give himself the 
trouble. My fellow-officers, and the merchants and 
sea-captains with whom my official duties brought me 
into any manner of connection, viewed me in no other 
light, and probably knew me in no other character. 
None of them, I presume, had ever read a page of my 
inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for me 
if they had read them all ; nor would it have mended 
the matter, in the least, had those same unprofitable 
pages been written with a pen like that of Burns or of 
Chaucer, each of whom was a Custom House officer 
in his day, as well as I. It is a good lesson — though 
it may often be a hard one — for a man who has 
dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself 
a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, 
to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his 
claims are recognized, and to find how utterly de- 
void of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he 
achieves, and all he aims at. I know not that I es- 
pecially needed the lesson, either in the way of warn- 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 29 

ing or rebuke ; but, at any rate, I learned it thoi-oughly : 
nor, it gives me pleasure to reflect, did the truth, as it 
came home to my perception, ever cost me a pang, or 
require to be thrown off in a sigh. In the way of lit- 
erary talk, it is true, the Naval Officer — an excellent 
fellow, who came into office with me and went out only 
a little later — would often engage me in a discussion 
about one or the other of his favorite topics. Napoleon 
or Shakespeare. The Collector's junior clerk, too, — 
a young gentleman who, it wao whispered, occasionally 
covered a sheet of Uncle Sam's letter-paper with what 
(at the distance of a few yards) looked very much like 
poetry, — used now and then to speak to me of books, 
as matters with which I might possibly be conversant. 
This was my all of lettered intercourse ; and it was 
quite sufficient for my necessities. 

No longer seeking nor caring that my name should 
be blazoned abroad on title-pages, I smiled to think 
that it had now another kind of vogue. The Custom 
House marker imprinted it, with a stencil and black 
paint, on pepper-bags, and baskets of anatto, and cigar- 
boxes, and bales of all kinds of dutiable merchandise, 
in testimony that these commodities had paid the im- 
post, and gone regiilarly through the office. Borne 
on such queer vehicle of fame, a knowledge of my ex- 
istence, so far as a name conveys it, was carried where 
it had never been before, and, I hope, will never go 
again. 

But the past was not dead. Once in a great while, 
the thoughts, that had seemed so vital and so active, 
yet had been put to rest so quietly, revived again. 
One of the most remarkable occasions, when the habit 
of bygone days awoke in me, was that which brings it 
within the law of literary propriety to offer the public 
the sketch which I am now writing. 



80 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

In the second story of the Custom House there is a 
large room, in which the brick-work and naked rafters 
have never been covered with panelling and plaster. 
The edifice — originally projected on a scale adapted 
to the old commercial enterprise of the port, and with 
an idea of subsequent prosperity destined never to be 
realized — contains far more space than its occupants 
know what to do with. This airy hall, therefore, over 
the Collector's apartments, remains unfinished to this 
day, and, in spite of the aged cobwebs that festoon its 
dusky beams, appears still to await the labor of the 
carpenter and mason. At one end of the room, in a 
recess, were a number of barrels, piled one upon an- 
other, containing bundles of official documents. Large 
quantities of similar rubbish lay lumbering the floor. 
It was sorrowful to think how many days and weeks 
and months and years of toil had been wasted on these 
musty papers, which were now only an encumbrance 
on earth, and were hidden away in this forgotten 
corner, never more to be glanced at by human eyes. 
But, then, what reams of other manuscripts — filled 
not with the dulness of official formalities, but with 
the thought of inventive brains and the rich effusion 
of deep hearts — had gone equally to oblivion ; and 
that, moreover, without serving a purpose in their day, 
as these heaped-up papers had, and — saddest of all 
— without purchasing for their writers the comforta- 
ble livelihood which the clerks of the Custom House 
had gained by these worthless scratchings of the pen ! 
Yet not altogether worthless, perhaps, as materials of 
local history. Here, no doubt, statistics of the former 
commerce of Salem might be discovered, and memo- 
rials of her princely merchants, — old King Derby, — 
old Billy Gray, — old Simon Forrester, — and many 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE, 31 

another maj^nate in his day; whose powdered head^ 
however, was scarcely in the tomb, before his moun- 
tain pile of wealth began to dwindle. The founders 
of the greater part of the families which now compose 
the aristocracy of Salem might here be traced, from 
the petty and obscure beginnings of their traffic, at 
periods generally much posterior to the Revolution, 
upward to what their children look upon as long-estab- 
lished rank. 

Prior to the Revolution, there is a dearth of rec- 
ords ; the earlier documents and archives of the 
Custom House having, probably, been carried off to 
Halifax, when all the King's officials accompanied the 
British army in its flight from Boston. It has often 
been a matter of regret with me ; for, going back, per- 
haps, to the days of the Protectorate, those papers 
must have contained many references to forgotten or 
remembered men, and to antique customs, which would 
have affected me with the same pleasure as when I 
used to pick up Indian arrow-heads in the field near 
the Old Manse. 

But one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to 
make a discovery of some little interest. Poking and 
burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish in the corner ; 
unfolding one and another document, and reading the 
names of vessels that had lono: ao:o foundered at sea 
or rotted at the wharves, and those of merchants never 
heard of now on 'Change, nor very readily deciphera- 
ble on their mossy tombstones ; glancing at such mat- 
ters with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest 
which we bestow on the corpse of dead activity, — and 
exerting my fancy, sluggish with little use, to raise 
up from these dry bones an image of the old town's 
brighter aspect, when India was a new region, and 



32 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

only Salem knew the way tliither, — I chanced to lay 
my hand on a small package, carefully done up in a 
piece of ancient yellow parchment. This envelope had 
the air of an official record of some period long past, 
when clerks engrossed their stiff and formal chirog- 
rapliy on more substantial materials than at present. 
There was something about it that quickened an in- 
stinctive curiosity, and made me imdo the faded red 
tape, that tied up the package, with the sense that a 
treasm'e would here be brought to light. Unbending 
the rigid folds of the parchment cover I fomid it to 
be a commission, under the hand and seal of Governor 
Shirley, in favor of one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of 
his Majesty's Customs for the port of Salem, in the 
Province of Massachusetts Bay. I remembered to 
have read (probably in Felt's Annals) a notice of the 
decease of Mr. Sm^veyor Pue, about fourscore years 
ago ; and likewise, in a newspaper of recent times, 
an account of the digging up of his remains in the 
little graveyard of St. Peter's Church, during the re- 
newal of that edifice. Nothing, if I rightly call to 
mind, was left of my respected predecessor, save an 
imperfect skeleton, and some fragments of apparel, 
and a wig of majestic frizzle ; which, unlike the head 
that it once adorned, was in very satisfactory pres- 
ervation. But, on examining the papers which the 
parchment commission served to envelop, I found more 
traces of Mr. Pue's mental part, and the internal opera- 
tions of his head, than the frizzled wig had contained 
of the venerable skull itself. 

They were documents, in short, not official, but of a 
private nature, or, at least, written in his private ca- 
pacity, and apparently with his own hand. I could 
accoimt for their being included in the heap of Cus- 



I 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 33 

torn House lumber only by the fact that Mr. Pue's 
death had happened suddenly ; and that these papers, 
which he probably kept in his official desk, had never 
come to the Ivuowledge of his heirs, or were supposed 
to relate to the business of the revenue. On the trans- 
fer of the archives to Halifax, this package, proving to 
be of no public concern, was left behind and had re- 
mained ever since unopened. 

The ancient Surveyor — being little molested, I sup- 
pose, at that early day, with business pertaining to his 
office — seems to have devoted, some of his many lei- 
sure hours to researches as a local antiquarian, and 
other inquisitions of a similar nature. These supplied 
material for petty activity to a mind that would other- 
wise have been eaten up with rust. A portion of his 
facts, by the by, did me good service in the preparation 
of the article entitled "Main Street," included in the 
third volume of this edition. The remainder may per- 
haps be applied to purposes equally valuable hereafter; 
or not impossibly may be worked up, so far as they go, 
into a regular history of Salem, should my veneration 
for the natal soil ever impel me to so pious a task. 
Meanwhile, they shall be at the command of any gen- 
tleman, inclined, and competent, to take the unprofitar 
ble labor off my hands. As a final disposition, I con- 
template depositing them with the Essex Historical 
Society. 

But the object that most drew my attention, in the 
mysterious package, was a certain affair of fine red 
cloth, much worn and faded. There were traces about 
it of gold embroidery, which, liowever, was greatly 
frayed and defaced ; so that none, or very little, of the 
glitter was left. It had been wrought, as was easy to 
perceive, with wonderful skill of needlework ; and the 



34 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

stitch (as I am assured by ladies conversant with suoh 
mysteries) gives evidence of a now forgotten art, not 
to be recovered even by the process of picking out the 
threads. This rag of scarlet cloth, — for time and 
wear and a sacrilegious moth had reduced it to little 
other than a rag, — on carefid examination, assumed 
the shape of a letter. It was the capital letter A. By 
an accurate measurement, each limb proved to be pre- 
cisely three inches and a quarter in length. It ha-d 
been intended, there could be no doubt, as an orna- 
mental article of dress ; but how it was to be worn, or 
what rank, honor, and dignity, in by-past times, were 
signified by it, was a riddle which (so evanescent are 
the fashions of the world in these particulars) I saw 
little hope of solving. And yet it strangely interested 
me. My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scar- 
let letter, and would not be turned aside. Certainly, 
there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of 
interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth 
from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself 
to my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my 
mind. 

While thus perplexed, — and cogitating, among 
other hypotheses, whether the letter might not have 
been one of those decorations which the white men 
used to contrive, m order to take the eyes of Indians, 
— I happened to place it on my breast. It seemed to 
me, — the reader may smile, but must not doubt my 
word, — it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a 
sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of 
burning heat ; and as if the letter were not of red 
cloth, but red-hot iron. I shuddered, and involunta- 
rily let it fall upon the floor. 

In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet letter, 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 35 

I had hitherto neglected to examine a small roll of 
dingy paper, around which it had been twisted. This I 
now opened, and had the satisfaction to find, recorded 
by the old Surveyor's pen, a reasonably complete ex- 
planation of the whole affair. There were several 
foolscap sheets containing many particulars respecting 
the life and conversation of one Hester Prynne, who 
appeared to have been rather a noteworthy personage 
in the view of our ancestors. She had flourished 
during the period between the early days of Massa- 
chusetts and the close of the seventeenth century. 
Aged persons, alive in the time of Mr. Surveyor Pue, 
and from whose oral testimony he had made up his 
narrative, remembered her, in their youth, as a very 
old, but not decrepit woman, of a stately and solemn 
aspect. It had been her habit, from an almost imme- 
morial date, to go about the country as a kind of vol- 
untary nurse, and doing whatever miscellaneous good 
she might ; taking upon herself, likewise, to give ad- 
vice in all matters, especially those of the heart ; by 
which means, as a person of such propensities inevita- 
bly must, she gained from many people the reverence 
due to an angel, but I should imagine, was looked 
upon by others as an intruder and a nuisance. Pry- 
ing further into the manuscript, I found the record of 
other doings and sufferings of this singular woman, for 
most of which the reader is referred to the story enti- 
tled " The Scarlet Letter " ; and it should be borne 
carefully in mind, that the main facts of that story are 
authorized and authenticated by the document of Mr. 
Surveyor Pue. The original papers, together with the 
scarlet letter itself, — a most curious relic, — are still 
in my possession, and shall be freely exhibited to 
whomsoever, induced by the great interest of the nar- 



36 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

rative, may desire a sight of them. I must not be 
understood as affirming, that, in the dressing up of 
the tale, and imaginmg the motives and modes of pas- 
sion that influenced the characters who figure in it, I 
have invariably confined myself within the limits of 
the old Surveyer's half a dozen sheets of foolscap. On 
the contrary, I have allowed myself, as to such points, 
nearly or altogether as much license as if the facts 
had been entirely of my own invention. What I con- 
tend for is the authenticity of the outline. 

This incident recalled my mind, in some degree, to 
its old track. There seemed to be here the ground- 
work of a tale. It impressed me as if the ancient Sur- 
veyor, in his garb of a hundred years gone by, and 
wearing his immortal wig, — wliich was buried with 
him, but did not perish in the grave, — had met me 
in the deserted chamber of the Custom House. In 
his port was the dignity of one who had borne his 
Majesty's commission, and who was therefore illumi- 
nated by a ray of the splendor that shone so dazzlingly 
about the throne. How unlike, alas ! the hang - dog 
look of a republican official, who, as the servant of the 
people, feels himself less than the least, and below the 
lowest, of his masters. With his own ghostly hand, 
the obscurely seen but majestic figure had imparted to 
me the scarlet symbol, and the little roll of explana- 
tory manuscript. With his own ghostly voice he had 
exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial 
duty and reverence towards him, — who might rea- 
sonably regard himself as my official ancestor, — to 
bring his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before 
the public. " Do this," said the ghost of Mr. Sur- 
veyor Pue, emphatically nodding the head that looked 
so imposing within its memorable wig, — " do this, and 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 37 

the profit shall be all your own ! You will shortly 
need it ; for it is not in your days as it was in mine, 
when a man's office was a life-lease, and oftentimes an 
heirloom. But, I charge you, in this matter of old 
Mistress Prynne, give to your predecessor's memory 
the credit which will be rightfully due ! " And I said 
to the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, " I will ! "• 

On Hester Prynne's story, therefore, I bestowed 
much thought. It was the subject of my meditations 
for many an hour, while pacing to and fro across my 
room, or traversing, with a hundred-fold repetition, 
the long extent from the front -door of the Custom 
House to the side-entrance, and back again. Great 
were the weariness and annoyance of the old Inspector 
and the Weighers and Gaugers, whose slumbers were 
disturbed by the unmercifully lengthened tramp of 
my passing and returning footsteps. Remembering 
their own former habits, they used to say that the 
Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck. They prob- 
ably fancied that my sole object — and, indeed, the 
sole object for which a sane man could ever put him- 
self into voluntary motion — was, to get an appetite 
for dinner. And to say the truth, an appetite, sharp- 
ened by the east wind that generally blew along the 
passage, was the only valuable result of so much inde- 
fatigable exercise. So little adapted is the atmos- 
phere of a Custom House to the delicate harvest of 
fancy and sensibility, that, had I remained there 
through ten Presidencies yet to come, I doubt whether 
the tale of "The Scarlet Letter" w^oidd ever have 
been brought before the public eye. My imagination 
was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only 
with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did 
my best to people it. The characters of the narrative 



38 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. , 

would not be warmed and rendered malleable by any 
heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge. 
They would take neither the glow of passion nor the 
tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity 
of dead corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed 
and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. "What 
have you to do with us ? " that expression seemed to 
say. "The little power you might once have pos- 
sessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone ! You have 
bartered it for a pittance of the public gold. Go, 
then, and earn your wages I " In short, the almost 
torpid creatures of my own fancy twitted me with 
imbecility, and not without fair occasion. 

It was not merely during the three hours and a half 
which Uncle Sam claimed as his share of my daily 
life, that this wretched numbness held possession of 
me. It went with me on my searshore walks, and 
rambles into the country, whenever — which was sel- 
dom and reluctantly — I bestirred myself to seek that 
invigorating charm of Nature, which used to give me 
such freshness and activity of thought, the moment 
that I stepped across the threshold of the Old Manse. 
The same torpor, as regarded the capacity for intel- 
lectual effort, accompanied me home, and weighed 
upon me in the chamber which I most absurdly termed 
my study. Nor did it quit me, when, late at night, I 
sat in the deserted parlor, lighted only by the glim- 
mering coal-fire and the moon, striving to picture forth 
imaginary scenes, which, the next day, might flow out 
on the brightening page in many-hued description. 

If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an 
hour, it might well be deemed a hopeless case. Moon- 
light, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the 
carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly, — 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 39 

making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike 
a morning or noontide visibility, — is a medium the 
most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted 
with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic 
scenery of the well-known apartment ; the chairs with 
each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sus- 
taining a work-basket, a volume or two, and an extin- 
guished lamp ; the sofa ; the bookcase ; the picture on 
the wall, — all these details, so completely seen, are 
so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem 
to lose their actual substance, and become things of 
intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to 
undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby. 
A child's shoe ; the doll, seated in her little wicker 
carriage ; the hobby-horse, — whatever, in a word, has 
been used or played with, during the day, is now 
invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, 
though still almost as vividly present as by daylight. 
Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has 
become a neutral territory, somewhere between the 
real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the 
Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the 
nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here, with- 
out affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping 
with the scene to excite surprise, v/ere we to look 
about us and discover a form beloved, but gone hence, 
.now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moon- 
shine, with an aspect that would make us doubt 
whether it had returned from afar, or had never once 
stirred from our fireside. 

The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influ- 
ence in producing the effect which I would describe. 
It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, 
with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and 



40 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. 
This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirit- 
uality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it 
were, a heart and sensibilities of hiunan tenderness 
to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts 
them from snow-images into men and women. Glanc- 
ing at the looking-glass, we behold — deep within its 
haunted verge — the smouldering glow of the half- 
extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the 
floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of 
the picture, with one remove further from the actual, 
and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such an 
hoiu", and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting 
all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them 
look like truth, he need never try to write romances. 

But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom 
House experience, moonlight and sunshine, and the 
glow of firelight, were just alike in my regard ; and 
neither of them was of one whit more avail than the 
twinkle of a tallow -candle. An entire class of sus- 
ceptibilities, and a gift connected with them, — of no 
great richness or value, but the best I had, — was 
gone from me. 

It is my belief, however, that, had I attempted a 
different order of composition, my faculties would not 
have been found so pointless and inefficacious. I 
might, for instance, have contented myself with wi'it- 
ing out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of 
the Inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not 
to mention, since scarcely a day passed that he did 
not stir me to laughter and admiration by his marvel- 
lous gifts as a story-teller. Could I have preserved 
the picturesque force of his style, and the humorous 
coloring which nature taught him how to throw over 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 41 

his descriptions, the result, I honestly believe, would 
have been something new in literature. Or I might 
readily have found a more serious task. It was a 
folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing 
so intrusively upon nie, to attempt to fling myself 
back into another age ; or to insist on creating the 
semblance of a world out of airy matter, when, at 
every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-. 
bubble was broken by the rude contact of some actual 
circumstance. The wiser effort would have been to 
diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque 
substance of to-day, and thus to make it a bright 
transparency ; to spiritualize the burden that began to 
weigh so heavily; to seek, resolutely, the true and 
indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and 
wearisome incidents, and ordinary characters, with 
which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. 
The page of life that was spread out before me seemed 
dull and commonplace, only because I had not fath- 
omed its deeper import. A better book than I shall 
ever write was there ; leaf after leaf presenting itself 
to me, just as it was written out by the reality of the 
flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only be- 
cause my brain wanted the insight and my hand the 
cunning to transcribe it. At some future day, it may 
be, I shall remember a few scattered fragments and 
broken paragraphs, and wi^ite them down, and find the 
letters turn to gold upon the page. 

These perceptions have come too late. At the in- 
stant, I was only conscious that what would have been 
a pleasure once was now a hopeless toil. There was 
no occasion to make much moan about this state of 
affairs. I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor 
tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good 



42 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, never- 
theless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by 
a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away ; or 
exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of 
a phial ; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller 
and less volatile residuum. Of the fact there could be 
no doubt; and, examining myself and others, I was 
led to conclusions, in reference to the effect of public 
office on the character, not very favorable to the mode 
of life in question. In some other form, perhaps, I 
may hereafter develop these effects. Suffice it here 
to say, that a Custom House officer, of long continu- 
ance, can hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable 
personage, for many reasons ; one of them, the tenure 
by which he holds his situation, and another, the very 
nature of his business, which — though, I trust, an 
honest one — is of such a sort that he does not share 
in the united effort of mankind. 

An effect — which I believe to be observable, more 
or less, in every individual who has occupied the posi- 
tion — is, that, while he leans on the mighty arm of 
the Republic, his own proper strength departs from 
him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weak- 
ness or force of his original nature, the capability of 
self-support. If he possess an unusual share of na- 
tive energy, or the enervating magic of place do not 
operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers may 
be redeemable. The ejected officer — fortunate in the 
unkindly shove that sends him forth betimes to strug- 
gle amid a struggling world — may return to himself, 
and become all that he has ever been. But this sel- 
dom happens. He usually keeps his ground just long 
enough for his own ruin, and is then thrust out, with 
sinews all unstrung, to totter along the difficult foot- 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 43 

path of life as he best may. Conscious of his own in- 
firmity, — that his tempered steel and elasticity are 
lost, — he forever afterwards looks wistfully about him 
in quest of support external to himself. His pervad- 
ing and continual hope — a hallucination which, in the 
face of all discouragement, and maldng light of impos- 
sibilities, haunts him while he lives, and, I fancy, like 
the convulsive throes of the cholera, torments him for 
a brief space after death — is that finally, and in no 
long time, by some happy coincidence of circumstances, 
he shall be restored to office. This faith, more than 
anything else, steals the pith and availability out of 
whatever enterprise he may dream of undertaking. 
Why should he toil and moil, and be at so much 
trouble to pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a 
little while hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will 
taise and support him? Why should he work for his 
living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is 
BO soon to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a 
little pile of glittering coin out of his Uncle's pocket ? 
It is sadly curious to observe how slight a taste of of- 
fice suffices to infect a poor fellow with this singular 
disease. Uncle Sam's gold — meaning no disrespect 
to the worthy old gentleman — has, in this respect, a 
quality of enchantment like that of the Devil's wages. 
Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or he 
may find the bargain to go hard against him, involv- 
ing, if not his soul, yet many of its better attributes ; 
its sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, 
its self-reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to 
manly character. 

Here was a fine prospect in the distance I Not that 
the Surveyor brought the lesson home to himself, or 
admitted that he could be so utterly undone, either by 



44 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

continuance in office or ejectment. Yet my reflections 
were not the most comfortable. I began to grow mel- 
ancholy and restless ; continually prying into my mind, 
to discover which of its poor properties were gone, and 
what degree of detriment had already accrued to the 
remainder. I endeavored to calculate how much longer 
I could stay in the Custom House, and yet go forth a 
man. To confess the truth, it was my greatest appre- 
hension, — as it would never be a measure of policy 
to turn out so quiet an individual as myself, and it be- 
ing hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign, — 
it was my chief trouble, therefore, that I was likely to 
grow gray and decrepit in the Surveyorship, and be- 
come much such another animal as the old Inspector. 
Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official life that 
lay before me, finally be with me as it was with this 
venerable friend, — to make the dinner-hour the nu- 
cleus of the day, and to spend the rest of it, as an old 
dog spends it, asleep in the sunshine or in the shade ? 
A dreary look-forward this, for a man who felt it to 
be the best definition of happiness to live throughout 
the whole range of his faculties and sensibilities ! 
But, all this while, I was giving myself very unneces- 
sary alarm. Providence had meditated better things 
for me than I could possibly imagine for myself. 

A remarkable event of the third year of my Survey- 
orship — to adopt the tone of " P. P." — was the elec- 
tion of General Taylor to the Presidency. It is essen- 
tial, in order to a complete estimate of the advantages 
of official life, to view the incumbent at the incoming 
of a hostile administration. His position is then one of 
the most singularly irksome, and, in every contingency, 
disagreeable, that a wretched mortal can possibly oc- 
cupy ; with seldom an alternative of good, on either 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 45 

hand, although what presents itself to him as the worst 
event may very probably be the best. But it is a 
strange experience, to a man of pride and sensibility, 
to know that his interests are within the control of in- 
dividuals who neither love nor understand him, and by 
whom, since one or the other must needs happen, he 
would rather be injured than obliged. Strange, too, 
for one who has kept his calmness throughout the con- 
test, to observe the blood thirstiness that is developed 
in the hour of triumph, and to be conscious that he is 
himself among its objects ! There are few uglier traits 
of human nature than this tendency — which I now 
witnessed in men no worse than their neighbors — to 
grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power 
of inflicting harm. If the guillotine, as applied to 
office holders, were a literal fact instead of one of the 
most apt of metaphors, it is my sincere belief that the 
active members of the victorious party were sufficiently 
excited to have chopped off all our heads, and have 
thanked Heaven for the opportunity ! It appears to 
me — who have been a calm and curious observer, as 
well in victory as defeat — that this fierce and bitter 
spirit of malice and revenge has never distinguished 
the many triumphs of my own party as it now did that 
of the Whigs. The Democrats take the offices, as a 
general rule, because they need them, and because the 
practice of many years has made it the law of political 
warfare, which, unless a different system be proclaimed, 
it were weakness and cowardice to murmur at. But 
the long habit of victory has made them generous. 
They know how to spare, when they see occasion ; and 
when they strike, the axe may be sharp, indeed, but 
its edge is seldom poisoned with ill-will ; nor is it their 
custom ignominiously to kick the head which they 
have just struck off. 



46 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, 
I saw much reason to congratulate myself that 1 was 
on the losing side, rather than the triumphant one. 
If, heretofore, I had been none of the warmest of par- 
tisans, I began now, at this season of peril and adveiv 
sity, to be j^retty acutely sensible with which party my 
predilections lay ; nor was it without something like 
regret and shame, that, according to a reasonable cal* 
culation of chances, I saw my own prospect of retain- 
ing office to be better than those of my Democratic 
brethren. But who can see an inch into futurity* be- 
yond his nose ? My own head was the first that fell I 

The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom 
or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most 
agreeable of his life. Nevertheless, like the greater 
part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency 
brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the suf- 
ferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of 
the accident which has befallen him. In my particu- 
lar case, the consolatory topics were close at hand, and, 
indeed, had suggested themselves to my meditations a 
considerable time before it was requisite to use them. 
In view of my previous weariness of office, and vague 
thoughts of resignation, my fortune somewhat resem- 
bled that of a person who should entertain an idea 
of committing suicide, and, although beyond his hopes, 
meet with the good hap to be murdered. In the Cus- 
tom House, as before in the Old Manse, I had spent 
three years; a term long enough to rest a weary 
brain ; long enough to break off old intellectual habits 
and make room for new ones ; long enough, and too 
long, to have lived in an unnatural state, doing what 
was really of no advantage nor delight to any human 
being, and withholding myself from toil that would, 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 47 

at least, have stilled an unquiet impulse in me. Then, 
moreover, as regarded his unceremonious ejectment, 
the late Surveyor was not altogether ill-pleased to be 
recognized by the Whigs as an enemy ; since his inac- 
tivity in political affairs — his tendency to roam, at 
^ill, in that broad and quiet field where all mankind 
may meet, rather than confine himself to those narrow 
paths where brethren of the same household must di- 
verge from one another — had sometimes made it 
questionable with his brother Democrats whether he 
was a friend. Now, after he had won the crown of 
martyrdom (though with no longer a head to wear it 
on), the point might be looked upon as settled. Fi- 
nally, little heroic as he was, it seemed more decorous 
to be overthrown in the downfall of the party with 
which he had been content to stand, than to remain a 
forlorn survivor, when so many worthier men were 
falling ; and, at last, after subsisting for four years on 
the mercy of a hostile administration, to be compelled 
then to define his position anew, and claim the yet 
more humiliating mercy of a friendly one. 

Meanwhile the press had taken up my affair, and 
kept me, for a week or two, careering through the pub- 
lic prints, in my decapitated state, like Irving's Head- 
less Horseman ; ghastly and grim, and longing to be 
buried, as a politically dead man ought. So much for 
my figurative self. The real human being, all this 
time with his head safely on his shoulders, had brought 
himself to the comfortable conclusion that everything 
was for the best ; and, making an investment in ink, 
paper, and steel -pens, had opened his long -disused 
writing-desk, and was again a literary man. 

Now it was that the lucubrations of my ancient 
predecessor, Mr. Surveyor Pue, came into play. Rusty 



48 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

through long idleness, some little space was requisite 
before my intellectual machinery could be brought to 
work upon the tale, with an effect in any degree satis- 
factory. Even yet, though my thoughts were ulti- 
mately much absorbed in the task, it wears, to my eye, 
a stern and sombre aspect ; too much ungiaddened by 
genial sunshine ; too little revealed by the tender and 
familiar influences which soften almost every scene of 
nature and real life, and, undoubtedly, should soften 
every picture of them. • This uncaptivating effect is 
perhaps due to the period of hardly accomplished rev- 
olution, and still seething turmoil, in which the story 
shaped itself. It is no indication, however, of a lack 
of cheerfulness in the writer's mind ; for he was hap- 
pier, while straying through the gloom of these sunless 
fantasies, than at any time since he had quitted the Old 
Manse. Some of the briefer articles, which contrib- 
ute to make up the volume, have likewise been \\T:'itten 
since my involuntary withdrawal from the toils and 
honors of public life, and the remainder are gleaned 
from annuals and magazines of such antique date 
that they have gone round the circle, and come back 
to novelty again. ^ Keeping up the metaphor of the 
political guillotine, the whole may be considered as the 
Posthumous Papers of a Decapitated Surveyor; 
and the sketch which I am now bringing to a close, 
if too autobiographical for a modest person to publish 
in his lifetime, will readily be excused in a gentleman 
who writes from beyond the grave. Peace be with all 
the world ! My blessing on my friends ! My forgive- 
ness to my enemies ! For I am in the realm of quiet ! 

1 At the time of writing this article, the author intended to pub- 
lish, along with The Scarlet Letter, several shorter tales and sketches. 
These it has been thought advisable to defer. 



THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 49 

The life of the Custom House lies like a dream be- 
hind me. The old Inspector, — who, by the by, 1 re- 
gret to say, was overthrown and kiUed by a horse, 
some time ago ; else he would certainly have lived 
forever, — he, and all those other venerable person- 
ages who sat with him at the receipt of custom, are 
but shadows in my view ; white-headed and wrinkled 
images, which my fancy used to sport with, and has 
now flung aside forever. The merchants, — Pingree, 
Phillips, Shepard, Upton, KimbaU, Bertram, Hunt, — 
these, and many other names, which had such a classic 
familiarity for my ear six months ago, — these men of 
traffic, who seemed to occupy so important a position 
in the world, — how little time has it required to dis- 
connect me from them all, not merely in act, but re- 
collection ! It is with an effort that I recall the fig- 
ures and appellations of these few. Soon, likewise, 
my old native town will loom upon me through the 
haze of memory, a mist brooding over and aroimd it ; 
as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an over- 
grown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary in- 
habitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its 
homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its 
main street. Henceforth it ceases to be a reality of 
my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else. My good 
townspeople will not much regret me ; for — though 
it has been as dear an object as any, in my literary 
efforts, to be of some importance in their eyes, and to 
win myself a pleasant memory in this abode and burial- 
place of so many of my forefathers — there has never 
been, for me, the genial atmosphere which a literary 
man requires, in order to ripen the best harvest of his 
mind. I shall do better amongst other faces ; and 



50 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, 

these familiar ones, it need hardly be said, wiU do just 
as well without me. 

It may be, however, — oh, transporting and trium- 
phant thought ! — that the great-grandchildren of the 
present race may sometimes think kindly of the scrib- 
bler of bygone days, when the antiquary of days to 
come, among the sites memorable in the town's his- 
tory, shall point out the locality of The Town Pump I 



MAIN STREET. 

A RESPECTABLE-LOOKING individual makes his bow 
and addresses the public. In my daily walks along 
the principal street of my native town, it has often oc- 
curred to me, that, if its growth from infancy upward, 
and the vicissitude of characteristic scenes that have 
passed along this thoroughfare during the more than 
two centuries of its existence, could be presented to 
the eye in a shifting panorama, it would be an exceed- 
ingly effective method of illustrating the march of 
time. Acting on this idea, I have contrived a certain 
pictorial exhibition, somewhat in the nature of a pup- 
pet-show, by means of which I propose to call up the 
multiform and many-colored Past before the spectator, 
and show him the ghosts of his forefathers, amid a 
succession of historic incidents, with no greater trouble 
than the turning of a crank. Be pleased, therefore, 
my indulgent patrons, to walk into the show-room, and 
take your seats before yonder mysterious curtain. The 
little wheels and springs of my machinery have been 
well oiled ; a multitude of puppets are dressed in char- 
acter, representing all varieties of fashion, from the 
Puritan cloak and jerkin to the latest Oak Hall coat; 
the lamps are trimmed, and shall brighten into noon- 
tide sunshine, or fade away in moonlight, or muffle 
their brilliancy in a November cloud, as the nature of 
the scene may require ; and, in short, the exhibition is 
just ready to commence. Unless something shoidd go 
wrong, — as, for instance, the misplacing of a picture, 



62 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

whereby the people and events of one century might 
be thrust into the middle of another ; or the breaking 
of a wire, which would bring the course of time to 
a sudden period, — barring, I say, the casualties to 
which such a complicated piece of mechanism is liable, 
■ — I flatter myself, ladies and gentlemen, that the per- 
formance will elicit your generous approbation. 

Ting-a-ting-ting ! goes the bell ; the curtain rises ; 
and we behold — not, indeed, the Main Street — but 
the track of leaf -strewn forest-land over which its dusty 
pavement is hereafter to extend. 

You perceive, at a glance, that this is the ancient 
and primitive wood, — the ever-youthful and venerably 
old, — verdant with new twigs, yet hoary, as it were, 
with the snowfall of innumerable years, that have ac- 
ciunulated upon its intermingled branches. The white 
man's axe has never smitten a single tree ; his footstep 
has never crumpled a single one of the withered leaves, 
which all the autumns since the flood have been har- 
vesting beneath. Yet, see ! along through the vista of 
impending boughs, there is already a faintly traced 
path, running nearly east and west, as if a prophecy 
or foreboding of the future street had stolen into the 
heart of the solemn old wood. Onward goes this 
hardly perceptible track, now ascending over a natural 
swell of land, now subsiding gently into a hollow ; 
traversed here by a little streamlet, which glitters like 
a snake through the gleam of sunshine, and quickly 
hides itself among the underbrush, in its quest for the 
neighboring cove *, and impeded there by the massy 
corpse of a giant of the forest, which had lived out its 
incalculable term of life, and been overthrown by mere 
old age, and lies buried in the new vegetation that is 
born of its decay. What footsteps can have worn this 



MAIN STREET. 63 

half -seen path ? Hark ! Do we not hear them now 
rustling softly over the leaves ? We discern an Indian 
woman, — a majestic and queenly woman, or else her 
spectral image does not represent her truly, — for this 
is the great Squaw Sachem, whose rule, with that of 
her sons, extends from Mystic to Agawam. That red 
chief, who stalks by her side, is Wappacowet, her 
second husband, the priest and magician, whose incan- 
tations shall hereafter affright the pale-faced settlers 
with grisly phantoms, dancing and shrieking in the 
woods at midnight. But greater woidd be the affright 
of the Indian necromancer, if, mirrored in the pool of 
water at his feet, he could catch a prophetic glimpse of 
the noonday marvels which the white man is destined 
to achieve ; if he coidd see, as in a dream, the stone 
front of the stately hall, which will cast its shadow 
over this very spot ; if he could be aware that the 
future edifice will contain a noble Museum, where, 
among countless curiosities of earth and sea, a few 
Indian arrow-heads shall be treasured up as memorials 
of a vanished race I 

No such forebodings disturb the Squaw Sachem and 
Wappacowet. They pass on, beneath the tangled 
shade, holding high talk on matters of state and relig- 
ion, and imagine, doubtless, that their own system of 
affairs will endure forever. Meanwhile, how full of 
its own proper life is the scene that lies around them ! 
The gray squirrel runs up the trees, and rustles among 
the upper branches. Was not that the leap of a deer ? 
And there is the whirr of a partridge ! Methinks, 
too, I catch the cruel and stealthy eye of a woH, as 
he draws back into yonder impervious density of un- 
derbrush. So, there, amid the murmur of boughs, go 
the Indian queen and the Indian priest; while the 



54 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, 

gloom of the broad wilderness impends over them, and 
its sombre mystery invests them as with something 
preternatural ; and only momentary streaks of quiver- 
ing sunlight, once in a great while, find their way 
down, and glimmer among the feathers in their dusky 
hair. Can it be that the thronged street of a city will 
ever pass into this twilight solitude, — over those soft 
heaps of the decaying tree -trunks, and through the 
swampy places, green with water-moss, and penetrate 
that hopeless entanglement of great trees, which have 
been uprooted and tossed together by a whirlwind ? It 
has been a wilderness from the creation. Must it not 
be a wilderness forever ? 

Here an acidulous-looking gentleman in blue glasses, 
with bows of Berlin steel, who has taken a seat at the 
extremity of the front row, begins, at this early stage 
of the exhibition, to criticise. 

" The whole affair is a manifest catchpenny ! " ob- 
serves he, scarcely under his breath. ••' The trees look 
more like weeds in a garden than a primitive forest ; 
the Squaw Sachem and Wappacowet are stiff in their 
pasteboard joints ; and the squirrels, the deer, and 
the wolf move with all the grace of a child's wooden 
monkey, sliding up and down a stick." 

" I am obliged to you, sir, for the candor of your 
remarks," replies the showman, with a bow. " Per- 
haps they are just. Human art has its limits, and we 
must now and then ask a little aid from the specta- 
tor's imagination." 

" You will get no such aid from mine," responds the 
critic. " I make it a point to see things precisely as 
they are. But come ! go ahead ! the stage is wait- 
ing!" 

The showman proceeds. 



MAIN STREET. 55 

Casting our eyes again over the scene, we perceive 
that strangers have found their way into the solitary 
place. In more than one spot, among the trees, an 
upheaved axe is glittering in the sunshine. Roger Co- 
nant, the first settler in Naumkeag, has built his dwell- 
ing, months ago, on the border of the forest-path ; and 
at this moment he comes eastward through the vista of 
woods, with his gun over his shoulder, bringing home 
the choice portions of a deer. His stalwart figure, 
clad in a leathern jerldn and breeches of the same, 
strides sturdily onward, with such an air of physical 
force and energy that we might almost expect the very 
trees to stand aside and give hmi room to pass. And 
so, indeed, they must ; for, humble as is his name in 
history, Roger Conant still is of that class of men who 
do not merely find, but make, their place in the system 
of human affairs ; a man of thoughtful strength, he 
has planted the germ of a city. There stands his habi- 
tation, showing in its rough architecture some features 
of the Indian wigwam, and some of the log-cabin, and 
somewhat, too, of the straw - thatched cottage in Old 
England, where this good yeoman had his birth and 
breeding. The dwelling is surrounded by a cleared 
space of a few acres, where Indian corn grows thriv- 
ingly among the stumps of the trees ; while the dark 
forest hems it in, and seems to gaze silently and sol- 
emnly, as if wondering at the breadth of sunshine 
which the white man spreads around him. An Indian, 
half hidden in the dusky shade, is gazing and wonder- 
ing too. 

Within the door of the cottage you discern the wife, 
with her ruddy English cheek. She is singing, doubt- 
less, a psalm tune, at her household work ; or, perhaps, 
she sighs at the remembrance of the cheerful gossip, 



66 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

and all the merry social life, of her native village be- 
yond the vast and melancholy sea. Yet the next mo- 
ment she laughs, with sympathetic glee, at the sports 
of her little tribe of children ; and soon turns round, 
with the homelook in her face, as her husband's foot 
is heard approaching the rough-hewn threshold. How 
sweet must it be for those who have an Eden in their 
hearts, like Roger Conant and his wife, to find a new 
world to project it into, as they have, instead of dwell- 
ing among old haunts of men, where so many house- 
hold fires have been kindled and burnt out, that the 
very glow of happiness has something dreary in it ! 
Not that this pair are alone in their wild Eden, for 
here comes Goodwife Massey, the young spouse of 
Jeffrey Massey, from her home hard by, with an infant 
at her breast. Dame Conant has another of like age ; 
and it shall hereafter be one of the disputed points of 
history which of these two babies was the first town- 
born child. 

But see ! Roger Conant has other neighbors within 
view. Peter Palfrey, likewise, has built himself a 
house, and so has Balch, and Norman, and Woodbury. 
Their dwellings, indeed, — such is the ingenious con- 
trivance of this piece of pictorial mechanism, — seem 
to have arisen, at various points of the scene, even 
while we have been looking at it. The forest-track, 
trodden more and more by the hobnailed shoes of these 
sturdy and ponderous Englishmen, has now a distinct- 
ness which it never could have acquired from the light 
tread of a hundred times as many Indian moccasins. 
It will be a street, anon. As we observe it now, it goes 
onward from one clearing to another, here plunging 
into a shadowy strip of woods, there open to the sun- 
shine, but everywhere showing a decided line, along 



MAIN STREET. 57 

which human interests have begun to hold their career. 
Over yonder swampy spot, two trees have been felled, 
and laid side by side to make a causeway. In another 
place, the axe has cleared away a confused intricacy 
of fallen trees and clustered boughs, which had been 
tossed together by a hurricane. So now the little 
children, just beginning to run alone, may trip along 
the path, and not often stumble over an imjjediment, 
unless they stray from it to gather wood-berries be- 
neath the trees. And, besides the feet of grown peo- 
ple and children, there are the cloven hoofs of a small 
herd of cows, who seek their subsistence from the na- 
tive grasses, and help to deepen the track of the future 
thoroughfare. Goats also browse along it, and nibble 
at the twigs that thrust themselves across the way. 
Not seldom, in its more secluded portions, where the 
black shadow of the forest strives to hide the trace of 
human footsteps, stalks a gaunt wolf, on the watch for 
a kid or a young calf ; or fixes his hungry gaze on the 
group of children gathering berries, and can hardly 
forbear to rush upon them. And the Indians, coming 
from their distant wigwams to view the white man's, 
settlement, marvel at the deep track which he makes, 
and perhaps are saddened by a flitting presentiment 
that this heavy tread will find its way over all the 
land ; and that the wild woods, the wild wolf, and the 
wild Indian will be alike trampled beneath it. Even 
so shall it be. The pavements of the Main Street 
must be laid over the red man's grave. 

Behold ! here is a spectacle which should be ush- 
ered in by the peal of trumpets, if Naumkeag had 
ever yet heard that cheery music, and by the roar of 
cannon, echoing among the woods. A procession, — 
for, by its dignity, as marking an epoch in the history 



58 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

of the street, it deserves that name, — a procession 
advances along the pathway. The good ship Abigail 
has arrived from England, bringing wares and mer- 
chandise, for the comfort of the inhabitants and traffic 
with the Indians ; bringing passengers too, and, more 
important than all, a governor for the new settlement. 
Roger Conant and Peter Palfrey, with their com- 
panions, have been to the shore to welcome him ; and 
now, with such honor and triumph as their rude way 
of life permits, are escorting the sea-flushed voyagers 
to their habitations. At the point where Endicott 
enters upon the scene, two venerable trees unite their 
branches high above his head ; thus forming a tri- 
umphal arch of living verdure, beneath which he 
pauses, with his wife leaning on his arm, to catch the 
first impression of their new-found home. The old 
settlers gaze not less earnestly at him, than he at the 
hoary woods and the rough surface of the clearings. 
They like his bearded face, under the shadow of the 
broad-brimmed and steeple-crowned Puritan hat, — a 
visage resolute, grave, and thoughtful, yet apt to kindle 
with that glow of a cheerful spirit by which men of 
strong character are enabled to go joyfully on their 
proper tasks. His form, too, as you see it, in a doub- 
let and hose of sad-colored cloth, is of a manly make, 
fit for toil and hardship, and fit to wield the heavy 
sword that hangs from his leathern belt. His aspect 
is a better warrant for the ruler's office than the parch- 
ment commission which he bears, however fortified it 
may be with the broad seal of the London council. 
Peter Palfrey nods to Roger Conant. " The worship- 
fid Court of Assistants have done wisely," say they be- 
tween themselves. " They have chosen for our gov- 
ernor a man out of a thousand." Then they toss up 



MAIN STREET. 59 

their hats, — they, and all the uncouth figures of their 
company, most of whom are clad in skins, inasmuch 
as their old kersey and linsey-woolsey garments have 
been torn and tattered by many a long month's wear, 
— they all toss up their hats, and salute their new 
governor and captain with a hearty English shout of 
welcome. We seem to hear it with our own ears, so 
perfectly is the action represented in this life-like, this 
almost magic, picture ! 

But have you observed the lady who leans upon the 
arm of Endicott ? — a rose of beauty from an English 
garden, now to be transplanted to a fresher soil. It 
may be that, long years — centuries indeed — after 
this fair flower shall have decayed, other flowers of the 
same race will appear in the same soil, and gladden 
other generations with hereditary beauty. Does not 
the vision haunt us yet ? Has not Nature kept the 
mould unbroken, deeming it a pity that the idea should 
vanish from mortal sight forever, after only once as- 
suming earthly substance? Do we not recognize, in 
that fair woman's face, the model of features which 
still beam, at happy moments, on what was then the 
woodland pathway, but has long since grown into a 
busy street ? 

" This is too ridiculous ! — positively insufferable ! " 
mutters the same critic who had before expressed his 
disapprobation. " Here is a pasteboard figure, such as 
a child would cut out of a card, with a pair of very 
dull scissors ; and the fellow modestly requests us to 
see in it the prototype of hereditary beauty! " 

" But, sir, you have not the proper point of view," 
remarks the showman. " You sit altogether too near 
to get the best effect of my pictorial exhibition. Pray, 
oblige me by removing* to this other bench, and I ven- 



60 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

ture to assure you the proper light and shadow will 
transform the spectacle into quite another thing." 

" Pshaw ! " replies the critic ; " I want no other 
light and shade. I have already told you that it is 
my business to see things just as they are." 

" I would suggest to the author of this ingenious 
exhibition," observes a gentlemanly person, who has 
shown signs of being much interested, — "I would 
suggest that Anna Gower, the first wife of Governor 
Endicott, and who came with him from England, left 
no posterity ; and that, consequently, we cannot be in- 
debted to that honorable lady for any sjDCcimens of 
feminine loveliness now extant among us." 

Having nothing to allege against this genealogical 
objection, the showman points again to the scene. 

During this little interruption, you perceive that the 
Anglo-Saxon energy — as the phrase now goes — has 
been at work in the spectacle before us. So many 
chimneys now send up their smoke, that it begins to 
have the aspect of a village street ; although every- 
thing is so inartificial and inceptive, that it seems as 
if one returning wave of the wild nature might over- 
whelm it all. But the one edifice which gives the 
pledge of permanence to this bold enterprise is seen 
at the central point of the picture. There stands the 
meeting-house, a small sti'ucture, low-roofed, without a 
spire, and built of rough timber, newly hewn, with the 
sap still in the logs, and here and there a strip of bark 
adhering to them. A meaner temple was never con- 
secrated to the worship of the Deity. With the al- 
ternative of kneeling beneath the awful vault of the 
firmament, it is strange that men should creep into 
this pent-up nook, and expect God's presence there. 
Such, at least, one would imagine, might be the feel- 



MAIN STREET. 61 

ing of these forest-settlers, accustomed, as they had 
been, to stand under the dim arches of vast cathedrals, 
and to offer up their hereditary worship in the old 
ivy-covered churches of rural England, around which 
lay the bones of many generations of their forefathers. 
How could they dispense with the carved altar-work ? 
— how, with the pictured windows, where the light 
of common day was hallowed by being transmitted 
through the glorified figures of saints ? — how, with 
the lofty roof, imbued, as it must have been, with the 
prayers that had gone upward for centuries ? — how, 
with the rich peal of the solemn organ, rolling along 
the aisles, pervading the whole church, and sweeping 
the soul away on a flood of audible religion ? They 
needed nothing of all this. Their house of worship, 
like their ceremonial, was naked, simple, and severe. 
But the zeal of a recovered faith burned like a lamp 
within their hearts, enriching everything aroimd them 
with its radiance ; making of these new walls, and this 
narrow compass, its own cathedral ; and being, in it- 
self, that spiritual mystery and experience, of which 
sacred architecture, pictured windows, and the organ's 
grand solemnity are remote and imperfect symbols. 
All was well, so long as their lamps were freshly 
kindled at the heavenly flame. After a while, how- 
ever, whether in their time or their children's, these 
lamps began to burn more dimly, or with a less genu- 
ine lustre ; and then it might be seen how hard, cold, 
and confined was their system, — how like an iron 
cage was that which they called Liberty. 

Too much of this. Look again at the picture, and 
observe how the aforesaid Anglo-Saxon energy is now 
trampling along the street, and raising a positive 
cloud of dust beneath its sturdy footsteps. For there 



62 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

the carpenters are building a new house, the frame of 
which was hewn and fitted in England, of English oak, 
and sent hither on shipboard ; and here a blacksmith 
makes huge clang and clatter on his an\il, shaping 
out tools and weapons ; and yonder a wheelwright, 
who boasts himself a London workman, regularly 
bred to his handicraft, is fashioning a set of wagon- 
wheels, the track of which shall soon be visible. The 
wild forest is shrinking back ; the street has lost the 
aromatic odor of the pine-trees, and of the sweet-fern 
that grew beneath them. The tender and modest 
wild-flowers, those gentle children of savage nature 
that grew pale beneath the ever-brooding shade, have 
shrunk away and disappeared, like stars that vanish 
in the breadth of light. Gardens are fenced in, and 
display pumpkin - beds and rows of cabbages and 
beans ; and, though the governor and the minister both 
view them with a disapproving eye, plants of broad- 
leaved tobacco, which the cultivators are enjoined to 
use privily, or not all. No wolf, for a year past, has 
been heard to bark, or known to range among the 
dwellings, except that single one, whose grisly head, 
with a plash of blood beneath it, is now affixed to the 
portal of the meeting-house. The partridge has ceased 
to run across the too-frequented path. Of all the wild 
life that used to throng here, only the Indians still 
come into the settlement, bringing the skins of beaver 
and otter, bear and elk, which they sell to Endicott 
for the wares of England. And there is little John 
Massey, the son of Jeffrey Massey and first-born of 
Naumkeag, playing beside his father's threshold, a 
child of six or seven years old. Which is the better 
grown infant, — the town or the boy ? 

The red men have become aware that the street is 



MAIN STREET. 63 

no longer free to them, save by the sufferance and per- 
mission of the settlers. Often, to impress them with 
an awe of English power, there is a muster and train- 
ing of the town -forces, and a stately march of the 
mail-clad band, like this which we now see advanc- 
ing up the street. There they come, fifty of them or 
more ; all with their iron breastplates and steel caps 
well burnished, and glimmering bravely against the 
sun ; their ponderous muskets on their shoulders, their 
bandoliers about their waists, their lighted matches in 
their hands, and the drum and fife playing cheerily 
before them. See! do they not step like martial men? 
Do they not manoeuvre like soldiers who have seen 
stricken fields ? And well they may ; for this band 
is composed of precisely such materials as those with 
which Cromwell is preparing to beat down the strength 
of a kingdom ; and his famous regiment of Ironsides 
might be recruited from just such men. In everything 
at this period. New England was the essential spirit 
and flower of that which was about to become upper- 
most in the mother-country. Many a bold and wise 
man lost the fame which would have accrued to him in 
English history, by crossing the Atlantic with our fore- 
fathers. Many a valiant captain, who might have been 
foremost at Marston Moor or Naseby, exhausted his 
martial ardor in the command of a log-built fortress, 
like that wliich you observe on the gently rising groimd 
at the right of the pathway, — its banner fluttering in 
the breeze, and the culverins and sakers showing their 
deadly muzzles over the rampart. 

A multitude of people were now thronging to New 
England : some, because the ancient and ponderous 
framework of Church and State threatened to crum- 
ble down upon their heads ; others, because they de- 



64 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

spaired of such a downfall. Among those who came to 
Namukeag were men of history and legend, whose feet 
leave a track of brightness along any pathway which 
they have trodden. You shall behold their life-like im- 
ages — their spectres, if you choose so to call them — 
passing, encountering with a familiar nod, stopping to 
converse together, praying, bearing weapons, laboring, 
or resting from their labors, in the Main Street. Here, 
now, comes Hugh Peters, an earnest, restless man, 
walking swiftly, as being impelled by that fiery activ- 
ity of nature which shall hereafter thrust him into the 
conflict of dangerous affairs, make him the chaplain 
and counsellor of Cromwell, and finally bring him to 
a bloody end. He pauses, by the meeting-house, to 
exchange a greeting with Roger Williams, whose face 
indicates, methinks, a gentler spirit, kinder and more 
expansive, than that of Peters ; yet not less active for 
what he discerns to be the will of God, or the welfare 
of mankind. And look ! here is a guest for Endicott, 
coming forth out of the forest, through which he has 
been journe}dng from Boston, and which, with its rude 
branches, has caught hold of his attire, and has wet his 
feet with its swamps and streams. Still there is some- 
thing in his mild and venerable, though not aged pres- 
ence — a propriety, an equilibriimi, in Governor Win- 
throp's nature — that causes the disarray of his cos- 
tume to be unnoticed, and gives us the same impres- 
sion as if he were clad in such grave and rich attire as 
we may suppose him to have worn in the Council Cham- 
ber of the colony. Is not this characteristic wonder- 
fully perceptible in our spectral representative of his 
person ? But what dignitary is this crossing from the 
other side to greet the governor ? A stately personage, 
in a dark velvet cloak, with a hoary beard, and a gold 



MAIN STREET. 65 

chain across his breast ; he has the authoritative port 
of one who has filled the highest civic station in the 
first of cities. Of all men in the world, we should least 
exj)ect to meet the Lord Mayor of London — as Sir 
Richard Saltonstall has been, once and again — in a 
forest-bordered settlement of the western wilderness. 

Farther down the street, we see Emanuel Downing, 
a grave and worthy citizen, with his son George, a 
stripling who has a career before him ; his shrewd 
and quick capacity and pliant conscience shall not only 
exalt him high, but secure him from a downfall. Here 
is another figure, on whose characteristic make and 
expressive action I will stake the credit of my picto- 
rial puppet-show. Have you not already detected a 
quaint, sly humor in that face, — an eccentricity in the 
manner, — a certain indescribable waywardness, — all 
the marks, in short, of an original man, unmistakably 
impressed, yet kept down by a sense of clerical re- 
straint ? That is Nathaniel Ward, the minister of 
Ipswich, but better remembered as the simple cobbler 
of Agawam. He hammered his sole so faithfully, and 
stitched his upper-leather so well, that the shoe is 
hardly yet worn out, though thrown aside for some 
two centuries past. And next, among these Puritans 
and Roundheads, we observe the very model of a 
Cavalier, with the curling lovelock, the fantastically 
trimmed beard, the embroidery, the ornamented ra- 
pier, the gilded dagger, and all other foppishnesses that 
distinguished the wild gallants who rode headlong to 
their overthrow in the cause of King Charles. This 
is Morton of Merry Mount, who has come hither to 
hold a council with Endicott, but will shortly be his 
prisoner. Yonder pale, decaying figure of a white- 
robed woman, who glides slowly along the street, is 



66 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

the Lady Arabella, looking for her own grave in the 
virgin soil. That other female form, who seems to be 
talking — we might almost say preaching or expound- 
ing — in the centre of a group of profoundly attentive 
auditors, is Ann Hutchinson. And here comes 
Vane — 

" But, my dear sir," interrupts the same gentleman 
who before questioned the showman's genealogical ac- 
curacy, " allow me to observe that these historical per- 
sonages coidd not possibly have met together in the 
Main Street. They might, and 23robably did, all visit 
our old town, at one time or another, but not simulta- 
neously ; and you have fallen into anachronisms that 
I positively shudder to think of ! " 

''The fellow," adds the scarcely civil critic, "has 
learned a bead-roll of historic names, whom he lugs 
into his pictorial puppet-show, as he calls it, helter- 
skelter, without caring whether they were contem- 
poraries or not, — and sets them all by the ears to- 
gether. But was there ever such a fund of impudence ? 
To hear his running commentary, you would suppose 
that these miserable slips of painted pasteboard, with 
hardly the remotest outlines of the human figure, had 
all the character and expression of Michael Angelo's 
pictures. Well ! go on, sir ! " 

" Sir, you break the illusion of the scene," mildly 
remonstrates the showman. 

" Illusion ! What illusion ? " rejoins the critic, with 
a contemptuous snort. " On the word of a gentleman, 
I see nothing illusive in the wretchedly bedaubed sheet 
of canvas that forms your background, or in these 
pasteboard slips that hitch and jerk along the front. 
The only illusion, permit me to say, is in the puppet- 
showman's tongue, — and that but a wretched one, 
into the bargain ! '* 



MAIN STREET. 67 

" We public men," replies the showman, meekly, 
" must lay our account, sometimes, to meet an uncan- 
did severity of criticism. But — merely for your own 
pleasure, sir — let me entreat you to take another 
point of view. Sit farther back, by that young lady, 
in whose face I have watched the reflection of every 
changing scene ; only oblige me-by sitting there ; and, 
take my word for it, the slips of pasteboard shall as- 
sume spiritual life, and the bedaubed canvas become 
an airy and changeable reflex of what it purports to 
represent." 

" I know better," retorts the critic, settling himself 
in his seat, with sullen but self-complacent immovable- 
ness. " And, as for my own pleasure, I shall best con- 
sult it by remaining precisely where I am." 

The showman bows, and waves his hand ; and, at 
the signal, as if time and vicissitude had been await- 
ing his permission to move onward, the mimic street 
becomes alive again. 

Years have rolled over our scene, and converted the 
forest-track into a dusty thoroughfare, which, being 
intersected with lanes and cross-paths, may fairly be 
designated as the Main Street. On the ground-sites 
of many of the log-built sheds, into which the first set- 
tlers crept for shelter, houses of quaint architecture 
have now risen. These later edifices are built, as you 
see, in one generally accordant style, though with such 
subordinate variety as keeps the beholder's curiosity 
excited, and causes each structure, like its owner's 
character, to produce its own peculiar impression. 
Most of them have one huge chimney in the centre, 
with flues so vast that it must have been easy for the 
witches to fly out of them, as they were wont to do, 
when bound on an aerial visit to the Black Man in the 



68 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

forest. Around this great chimney the wooden house 
clusters itseK in a whole community of gable-ends, 
each ascending into its own separate peak ; the second 
story, with its lattice-windows, projecting over the first ; 
and the door, which is perhaps arched, provided on the 
outside with an iron hammer, wherewith the visitor's 
hand may give a thundering rat-a-tat. The timber 
framework of these houses, as compared with those of 
recent date, is like the skeleton of an old giant, beside 
the frail bones of a modern man of fashion. Many of 
them, by the vast strength and soundness of their oaken 
substance, have been preserved through a length of 
time which would have tried the stability of brick and 
stone ; so that, in all the progressive decay and contin- 
ual reconstruction of the street, down to our own days, 
we shall still behold these old edifices occupying their 
long-accustomed sites. For instance, on the upper 
corner of that green lane, which shall hereafter be 
North Street, we see the Curwen House, newly built, 
with the carpenters still at work on the roof nailing 
down the last sheaf of shingles. On the lower corner 
stands another dwelling, — destined, at some period of 
its existence, to be the abode of an unsuccessfid al- 
chemist, — which shall likewise survive to our own 
generation, and perhaps long outlive it. Thus, through 
the medium of these patriarchal edifices, we have now 
established a sort of kindred and hereditary acquaint- 
ance with the Main Street. 

Great as is the transformation produced by a short 
term of years, each single day creeps through the Pu- 
ritan settlement sluggishly enough. It shall pass be- 
fore your eyes, condensed into the space of a few mo- 
ments. The gray light of early morning is slowly dif- 
fusing itseK over the scene ; and the bellman, whose 



MAIN STREET. 69 

office it is to cry the hour at the street-corners, rings 
the last peal upon his hand-bell, and goes wearily 
homewards, with the owls, the bats, and other crea- 
tures of the night. Lattices are thrust back on their 
hinges, as if the town were opening its eyes, in the 
summer morning. Forth stumbles the still drowsy 
cowherd, with his horn ; putting which to his lips, it 
emits a bellowing bray, impossible to be represented 
in the picture, but which reaches the pricked-up ears 
of every cow in the settlement, and tells her that the 
dewy pasture-hour is come. House after house awakes, 
and sends the smoke up curling from its chimney, like 
frosty breath from living nostrils ; and as those white 
wreaths of smoke, though impregnated with earthy ad- 
mixtures, climb skyward, so, from each dwelling, does 
the morning worship — its spiritual essence bearing 
up its human imperfection — find its way to the heav- 
enly Father's throne. 

The breakfast-hour being passed, the inhabitants do 
not, as usual, go to their fields or workshops, but re- 
main within doors ; or perhaps walk the street, with 
a grave sobriety, yet a disengaged and unburdened 
aspect, that belongs neither to a holiday nor a Sab- 
bath. And, indeed, this passing day is neither, nor 
is it a common week-day, although partaking of all 
the three. It is the Thursday Lecture ; an institution 
which New England has long ago relinquished, and 
almost forgotten, yet which it would have been better 
to retain, as bearing relations to both the spiritual 
and ordinary life, and bringing each acquainted with 
the other. The tokens of its observance, however, 
which here meet our eyes, are of rather a question- 
able cast. It is, in one sense, a day of public shame ; 
the day on which transgressors, who have made them- 



70 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

selves liable to the minor severities of the Puritan 
law, receive their reward of ignominy. At this very 
moment, the constable has bomid an idle fellow to the 
whipping-post, and is giving him his deserts with a 
cat-o'-nine-tails. Ever since sunrise, Daniel Faii'field 
has been standing on the steps of the meeting-house, 
with a halter about his neck, which he is condemned 
to wear visibly throughout his lif etmie ; Dorothy Talby 
is chained to a post at the corner of Prison Lane, 
with the hot sun blazing on her matronly face, and 
all for no other offence than lifting her hand against 
her husband; while, through the bars of that great 
wooden cage, in the centre of the scene, we discern 
either a human being or a wild beast, or both in one, 
whom this pviblic infamy causes to roar, and gnash 
his teeth, and shake the strong oaken bars, as if he 
woidd break forth, and tear in pieces the little chil- 
dren who have been peeping at him. Such are the 
profitable sights that serve the good people to while 
away the earlier part of lecture-day. Betimes in the 
forenoon, a traveller — the first traveller that has 
come hitherward this morning — rides slowly into the 
street on his patient steed. He seems a clergyman ; 
and, as he draws near, we recognize the minister of 
Lynn, who was pre-engaged to lecture here, and has 
been revolving his discourse as he rode through the 
hoary wilderness. Behold, now, the whole town throng- 
ing into the meeting-house, mostly with such sombre 
\asages that the sunshine becomes little better than a 
shadow when it falls upon them. There go the Thir- 
teen Men, grim riders of a grim community. There 
goes John Massey, the first town-born child, now a 
youth of twenty, whose eye wanders with peculiar in- 
terest towards that buxom damsel who comes up the 



MAIN STREET. 71 

steps at the same instant. There hobbles Goody Fos- 
ter, a sour and bitter old beldam, looking as if she 
went to curse and not to pray, and whom many of her 
neighbors suspect of taking an occasional airing on a 
broomstick. There, too, slinking shamefacedly in, you 
observe that same poor do-nothing and good-for-noth- 
ing whom we saw castigated just now at the whipping- 
post. Last of all, there goes the tithing-man, lugging 
in a couple of small boys, whom he has caught at play 
beneath God's blessed smishine, in a back lane. What 
native of Namiikeag, whose recollections go back more 
than thirty years, does not still shudder at that dark 
ogre of his infancy, who perhaps had long ceased to 
have an actual existence, but still lived in his childish 
belief, in a horrible idea, and in the nurse's threat, as 
the Tidy Man ! 

It will be hardly worth our while to wait two, or it 
may be three, turnings of the hour-glass, for the con- 
clusion of the lecture. Therefore, by my control over 
light and darkness, I cause the dusk, and then the 
starless night, to brood over the street ; and summon 
forth again the bellman, with his lantern casting a 
gleam about his footsteps, to pace wearily from corner 
to corner, and shout drowsily the hour to drowsy or 
dreaming ears. Happy are we, if for nothing else, 
yet because we did not live in those days. In truth, 
when the first novelty and stir of spirit had subsided, 
— when the new settlement, between the forest-border 
and the sea, had become actually a little town, — its 
daily life must have trudged onward with hardly any- 
thing to diversify and enliven it, while also its rigid- 
ity could not fail to cause miserable distortions of the 
moral nature. Such a life was sinister to the intel- 
lect, and sinister to the heart ; especially when one 



72 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

generation had bequeathed its religious gloom, and 
the counterfeit of its religious ardor, to the next ; for 
these characteristics, as was inevitable, assumed the 
form both of hypocrisy and exaggeration, by being in- 
herited from the example and precept of other human 
beings, and not from an original and spiritual source. 
The sons and grandchildren of the first settlers were a 
race of lower and narrower souls than their progeni- 
tors had been. The latter were stern, severe, intoler- 
ant, but not superstitious, not even fanatical ; and en- 
dowed, if any men of that age were, with a far-seeing 
worldly sagacity. But it was impossible for the suc- 
ceeding race to grow up, in heaven's freedom, beneath 
the discipline which their gloomy energy of charac- 
ter had established ; nor, it may be, have we even 
yet thrown off all the unfavorable influences, which, 
among many good ones, were bequeathed to us by our 
Puritan forefathers. Let us thank God for having 
given us such ancestors ; and let each successive gen- 
eration thank Him, not less fervently, for being one 
step further from them in the march of ages. 

" What is all this ? " cries the critic. " A sermon ? 
If so, it is not in the bill." 

"Very true," replies the showman ; "and I ask par- 
don of the audience." 

Look now at the street, and observe a strange peo- 
ple entering it. Their garments are torn and disor- 
dered, their faces haggard, their figures emaciated ; 
for they have made their way hither through pathless 
deserts, suffering hunger and hardship, with no other 
shelter than a hollow tree, the lair of a wild beast, or 
an Indian wigwam. Nor, in the most inhospitable 
and dangerous of such lodging-places, was there half 
the peril that awaits them in this thoroughfare of 



MAIN STREET. 73 

Christian men, with those secure dwellings and warm 
hearths on either side of it, and yonder meeting-house 
as the central object of the scene. These wanderers 
have received from Heaven a gift that, in all epochs 
of the world, has brought with it the penalties of mor- 
tal suffering and persecution, scorn, enmity, and death 
itself, — a gift that, thus terrible to its possessors, has 
ever been most hatefid to all other men, since its very 
existence seems to threaten the overthrow of whatever 
else the toilsome ages have built up, — the gift of a 
new idea. You can discern it in them, illuminating 
their faces — their whole persons, indeed, however 
earthly and cloddish — with a light that inevitably 
shines through, and makes the startled community 
aware that these men are not as they themselves are, 

— not brethren nor neighbors of their thought. Forth- 
with, it is as if an earthquake rumbled through the 
town, making its vibrations felt at every hearthstone, 
and especially causing the spire of the meeting-house 
to totter. The Quakers have come. We are in peril ! 
See ! they trample upon our wise and well-established 
laws in the person of our chief magistrate ; for Gov- 
ernor Endicott is passing, now an aged man, and dig- 
nified with longJiabits of authority, — and not one of 
the irreverent vagabonds has moved his hat. Did you 
note the ominous frown of the white-bearded Puritan 
governor, as he turned himself about, and, in his an- 
ger, half uplifted the staff that has become a needful 
support to his old age ? Here comes old Mr. Norris, 
our venerable minister. Will they doff their hats, 
and pay reverence to him ? No : their hats stick fast 
to their ungracious heads, as if they grew there ; and 

— impious varlets that they are, and worse than the 
heathen Indians ! — they eye our reverend pastor with 



74 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

a peculiar scorn, distrust, unbelief, and utter denial of 
his sanctified pretensions, of which he himself imme- 
diately becomes conscious ; the more bitterly conscious, 
as he never knew nor dreamed of the like before. 

But look yonder ! Can we believe our eyes ? A 
Quaker woman, clad in sackcloth, and with ashes on 
her head, has mounted the steps of the meeting-house. 
She addresses the people in a wild, shrill voice, — wild 
and shrill it must be to suit such a figure, — which 
makes them tremble and turn pale, although they 
crowd open-mouthed to hear her. She is bold against 
established authority ; she denounces the priest and 
his steeple-house. Many of her hearers are aj)palled ; 
some weep ; and others listen with a rapt attention, as 
if a living truth had now, for the first time, forced its 
way through the crust of habit, reached their hearts, 
and awakened them to life. This matter must be 
looked to ; else we have brought our faith across the 
seas with us in vain ; and it had been better that the 
old forest were still standing here, waving its tangled 
boughs and murmuring to the sky out of its desolate 
recesses, instead of this goodly street, if such blasphe- 
mies be spoken in it. 

So thought the old Puritans. Wh^t was their mode 
of action may be partly judged from the spectacles 
which now pass before your eyes. Joshua Buffum is 
standing in the pillory. Cassandra Southwick is led 
to prison. And there a woman, — it is Awn Coleman, 
— naked from the waist upward, and bound to the tail 
of a cart, is dragged through the Main Street at the 
pace of a brisk walk, while the constable follows with 
a whip of knotted cords. A strong-armed fellow is 
that constable ; and each time that he flourishes his 
lash in the air, you see a frown wrinkling and twisting 



MAIN STREET, 75 

his brow, and, at the same instant, a smile upon his 
lips. He loves his business, faithful officer that he is, 
and puts his soul into every stroke, zealous to fulfil the 
injunction of Major Hawthorne's warrant, in the spirit 
and to the letter. There came down a stroke that has 
drawn blood ! Ten such stripes are to be given in 
Salem, ten in Boston, and ten in Dedham ; and, with 
those thirty stripes of blood upon her, she is to be 
driven into the forest. The crimson trail goes waver- 
ing along the Main Street ; but Heaven grant that, as 
the rain of so many years has wept upon it, time after 
time, and washed it all away, so there may have been 
a dew of mercy to cleanse this cruel blood-stain out of 
the record of the persecutor's life ! 

Pass on, thou spectral constable, and betake thee to 
thine own place of torment. Meanwhile, by the silent 
operation of the mechanism behind the scenes, a con- 
siderable space of time woidd seem to have lapsed over 
the street. The older dwellings now begin to look 
weather-beaten, through the effect of the many eastern 
storms that have moistened their unpainted shingles 
and clapboards, for not less than forty years. Such 
is the age we would assign to the town, judging by the 
aspect of John Massey, the first town-born child, whom 
his neighbors now call Goodman Massey, and whom 
we see yonder, a grave, almost autumnal-looking man, 
with children of his OAvn about him. To the patriarchs 
of the settlement, no doubt, the Main Street is still 
but an affair of yesterday, hardly more antique, even 
if destined to be more permanent, than a path shov- 
elled through the snow. But to the middle-aged and 
elderly men who came hither in childhood or early 
youth, it presents the aspect of a long and well-estab- 
lished work, on which they have expended the strength 



76 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

and ardor of their life. And the younger people, 
native to the street, whose earliest recollections are of 
creeping over the paternal threshold, and rolling on 
the grassy margin of the track, look at it as one of 
the perdurable things of our mortal state, — as old as 
the hills of the great pasture, or the headland at the 
harbor's mouth. Their fathers and grandsires tell 
them how, within a few years past, the forest stood 
here with but a lonely track beneath its tangled shade. 
Vain legend ! They cannot make it true and real to 
their conceptions. With them, moreover, the Main 
Street is a street indeed, worthy to hold its way with 
the thronged and stately avenues of cities beyond the 
sea. The old Puritans tell them of the crowds that 
hurry along Cheapside and Fleet Street and the Strand, 
and of the rush of tumultuous life at Temple Bar. 
They describe London Bridge, itself a street, with a 
row of houses on each side. They speak of the vast 
structure of the Tower, and the solemn grandeur of 
Westminster Abbey. The children listen, and still in- 
quire if the streets of London are longer and broader 
than the one before their father's door ; if the Tower 
is bigger than the jail in Prison Lane ; if the old 
Abbey will hold a larger congregation than our meet- 
ing-house. Nothing impresses them, except their own 
experience. 

It seems all a fable, too, that wolves have ever 
prowled here ; and not less so that the Squaw Sachem, 
and the Sagamore her son, once ruled over this region, 
and treated as sovereign potentates with the English 
settlers, then so few and storm-beaten, now so powerful. 
There stand some school-boys, you observe, in a little 
group around a drunken Indian, himself a prince of 
the Squaw Sachem's lineage. He brought hither some 



MAIN STREET. 77 

beaver-skins for sale, and has already swallowed the 
larger portion of their price, in deadly draughts of 
fire-water. Is there not a touch of pathos in that 
picture ? and does it not go far towards telling the 
whole story of the vast growth and prosperity of one 
race, and the fated decay of another ? — the children 
of the stranger making game of the great Squaw 
Sachem's grandson ! 

But the whole race of red men have not vanished 
with that wild princess and her posterity. This march 
of soldiers along the street betokens the breaking out 
of King Philip's war ; and these young men, the flower 
of Essex, are on their way to defend the villages on 
the Connecticut ; where, at Bloody Brook, a terrible 
blow shall be smitten, and hardly one of that gallant 
band be left alive. And there, at that stately man- 
sion, with its three peaks in front, and its two little 
peaked towers, one on either side of the door, we see 
brave Captain Gardner issuing forth, clad in his em- 
broidered buff -coat, and his plumed cap upon his head. 
His trusty sword, in its steel scabbard, strikes clank- 
ing on the doorstep. See how the people throng to 
their doors and windows, as the cavalier rides past, 
reining his mettled steed so gallantly, and looking so 
like the very soul and emblem of martial achievement, 
— destined, too, to meet a warrior's fate, at the des- 
perate assaidt on the fortress of the Narragan setts \ 

" The mettled steed looks like a pig," interrupts the 
critic, " and Captain Gardner himself like the Devil, 
though a very tame one, and on a most diminutive 
scale." 

" Sir, sir ! " cries the persecuted showman, losing all 
patience, — for, indeed, he had particularly prided 
himself on these figures of Captain Gardner and his 



78 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

horse, — "I see that there is no hope of pleasing" you. 
Pray, sir, do me the favor to take back your money, 
and withdraw ! " 

" Not I ! " answers the unconscionable critic. " I 
am just beginning to get interested in the matter. 
Come ! turn your crank, and grind out a few more of 
these fooleries ! " 

The showman rubs his brow impulsively, whisks the 
little rod with which he points out the notabilities of 
the scene, but, finally, with the inevitable acquiescence 
of all public servants, resumes his composure and goes 
on. 

Pass onward, onwai^l, Time ! Build up new houses 
here, and tear down thy works of yesterday, that have 
already the rusty moss upon them ! Summon forth 
the minister to the abode of the young maiden, and 
bid him unite her to the joyful bridegroom ! Let the 
youthful parents carry their first-born to the meeting- 
house, to receive the baptismal rite ! Knock at the 
door, whence the sable line of the funeral is next to 
issue ! Provide other successive generations of men, 
to trade, talk, quarrel, or walk in friendly intercom'se 
along the street, as their fathers did before them ! Do 
all thy daily and accustomed business, Father Time, 
in this thoroughfare, which thy footsteps, for so many 
years, have now made dusty ! But here, at last, thou 
leadest along a procession which, once witnessed, shall 
appear no more, and be remembered only as a hide- 
ous dream of thine, or a frenzy of thy old brain. 

" Turn your crank, I say," bellows the remorseless 
critic, " and grind it out, whatever it be, without fur- 
ther preface ! " 

The showman deems it best to comply. 

Then, here comes the worshipful Captain Curwen, 



MAIN STREET. 79 

sheriff of Essex, on horseback, at the head of an 
armed guard, escorting a company of condemned pris- 
oners from the jail to their place of execution on Gal- 
lows Hill. The witches! There is no mistaking 
them ! The witches ! As they approach up Prison 
Lane, and turn into the Main Street, let us watch 
their faces, as if we made a part of the pale crowd 
that presses so eagerly about them, yet shrinks back 
with such shuddering dread, leaving an open passage 
betwixt a dense throng on either side. Listen to what 
the people say. 

There is old George Jacobs, known hereabouts, 
these sixty years, as a man whom we thought upright 
in all his way of life, quiet, blameless, a good husband 
before his pious wife was summoned from the evil to 
come, and a good father to the children whom she left 
him. Ah! but when that blessed woman went to 
heaven, George Jacobs' s heart was empty, his hearth 
lonely, his life broken up ; his children were married, 
and betook themselves to habitations of their own; 
and Satan, in liis wanderings up and down, beheld 
this forlorn old man, to whom life was a sameness and 
a weariness, and found the way to tempt him. So 
the miserable sinner was prevailed with to mount into 
the air, and career among the clouds ; and he is 
proved to have been present at a witch - meeting as 
far off as Falmouth, on the very same night that his 
next neighbors saw him, with his rheumatic stoop, 
going in at liis own door. There is John Willard, 
too ; an honest man we thought him, and so shrewd 
and active in his business, so practical, so intent on 
every-day affairs, so constant at his little place of 
trade, where he bartered English goods for Indian 
corn and all kinds of country produce ! How could 



80 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

such a man find time, or what could put it into his 
mind, to leave his proper calling, and become a wiz- 
ard ? It is a mystery, unless the Black Man tempted 
him with great heaps of gold. See that aged couple, 
— a sad sight, truly, — John Proctor, and his wife 
Elizabeth. If there were two old people in all the 
county of Essex who seemed to have led a true Chris- 
tian life, and to be treading hopefully the little rem- 
nant of their earthly path, it was this very pair. Yet 
have we heard it sworn, to the satisfaction of the wor- 
shipful Chief-Justice Sewell, and all the court and 
jury, that Proctor and his wife have shown their with^ 
ered faces at cliildren's bedsides, mocking, making 
mouths, and affrighting the poor little innocents in the 
night-time. They, or their spectral appearances, have 
stuck pins into the Afflicted Ones, and thrown them 
into deadly fainting-fits with a touch or but a look. 
And, while we supposed the old man to be reading 
the Bible to his old wife, — she meanwhile knitting in 
the chimney-corner, — the pair of hoary reprobates 
have whisked up the chimney, both on one broom- 
stick, and flown away to a witch-communion, far into 
the depths of the chill, dark forest. How foolish ! 
Were it only for fear of rheumatic pains in their old 
bones, they had better have stayed at home. But 
away they went ; and the laughter of their decayed, 
cackling voices has been heard at midnight, aloft in 
the air. Now, in the sunny noontide, as they go tot- 
tering to the gallows, it is the Devil's turn to laugh. 

Behind these two, — who helj) one another along, and 
seem to be comforting and encouraging each other, in 
a manner truly pitiful, if it were not a sin to pity the 
old witch and wizard, — behind them comes a woman, 
with a dark proud face that has been beautiful, and a 






MAIN STREET, 81 

figure that is still majestic. Do you know her? It 
is Martha Carrier, whom the Devil found in a humble 
cottage, and looked into her discontented heart, and 
saw pride there, and tempted her with his promise 
that she should be Queen of Hell. And now, with 
that lofty demeanor, she is passing to her kingdom, 
and, by her unquenchable pride, transforms this escort 
of shame into a triiunphal procession, that shall attend 
her to the gates of her infernal palace, and seat her 
upon the fiery throne. Within this hour, she shall 
assume her royal dignity. 

Last of the miserable train comes a man clad in 
black, of small stature and a dark complexion, with a 
clerical band about his neck. Many a time, in the 
years gone by, that face has been uplifted heavenward 
from the pulpit of the East Meeting-House, when the 
Rev. Mr. Burroughs seemed to worship God. What I 
— he? The holy man! — the learned! — the wise I 
How has the Devil tempted him ? His fellow-crim- 
inals, for the most part, are obtuse, uncultivated crea- 
tures, some of them scarcely half-witted by nature, and 
others greatly decayed in their intellects through age. 
They were an easy prey for the destroyer. Not so 
with this George Burroughs, as we judge by the in- 
ward light which glows through his dark countenance, 
and, we might almost say, glorifies his figure, in spite 
of the soil and haggardness of long imprisonment, — 
in spite of the hea\^ shadow that must fall on him, 
while death is walking by his side. What bribe could 
Satan offer, rich enough to tempt and overcome this 
man ? Alas ! it may have been in the very strength 
of his high and searching intellect that the Tempter 
found the weakness which betrayed him. He yearned 
for knowledge 5 he went groping onward into a world 



82 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

of mystery ; at first, as the witnesses have sworn, he 
summoned up tlie ghosts of his two dead wives, and 
talked with them of matters beyond the grave ; and, 
when their responses failed to satisfy the intense and 
sinfid craving of his spirit, he called on Satan, and 
was heard. Yet — to look at him — who, that had 
not known the proof, could believe him guilty ? Who 
would not say, while we see him offering comfort to 
the weak and aged partners of his horrible crime, — 
while we hear his ejaculations of prayer, that seem to 
bubble up out of the depths of his heart, and fly 
heavenward, unawares, — while we behold a radiance 
brightening on his features as from the other world, 
which is but a few steps off, — who would not say, 
that, over the dusty track of the Main Street, a Chris- 
tian saint is now going to a martyr's death ? May not 
the Arch-Fiend have been too subtle for the court and 
jury, and betrayed them — laughing in his sleeve the 
while — into the awful error of pouring out sanctified 
blood as an acceptable sacrifice upon God's altar? 
Ah ! no ; for listen to wise Cotton Mather, who, as he 
sits there on his horse, speaks comfortably to the per- 
plexed multitude, and tells them that all has been re- 
ligiously and justly done, and that Satan's power shall 
this day receive its death-blow in New England. 

Heaven grant it be so ! — the great scholar must be 
right ; so lead the poor creatures to their death ! Do 
you see that group of children and half-grown girls, 
and, among them, an old, hag-like Indian woman, Ti- 
tuba by name ? Those are the Afflicted Ones. Be- 
hold, at this very instant, a proof of Satan's power 
and malice ! Mercy Parris, the minister's daughter, 
has been smitten by a flash of Martha Carrier's eye, 
and falls down in the street, writhing with horrible 



MAIN STREET. 83 

spasms and foaming at the mouth, like the possessed 
one spoken of in Scripture. Hurry on the accursed 
witches to the gallows, ere they do more mischief ! — 
ere they fling out their withered arms, and scatter 
pestilence by handfuls among the crowd ! — ere, as 
their parting legacy, they cast a blight over the land, 
so that henceforth it may bear no fruit nor blade of 
grass, and be fit for nothing but a sepulclu-e for their 
unhallowed carcasses ! So on they go ; and old George 
Jacobs has stumbled, by reason of his infirmity ; but 
Goodman Proctor and his wife lean on one another, 
and walk at a reasonably steady pace, considering 
their age. Mr. Burroughs seems to administer coun- 
sel to Martha Carrier, whose face and mien, methinks, 
are milder and humbler than they were. Among the 
multitude, meanwhile, there is horror, fear, and dis- 
trust ; and friend looks askance at friend, and the 
husband at his Avife, and the wife at him, and even 
the mother at her little child ; as if, in every creature 
that God has made, they suspected a witch, or dreaded 
an accuser. Never, never again, whether in this or any 
other shape, may Universal Madness riot in the Main 
Street ! 

I perceive in your eyes, my indulgent spectators, 
the criticism which you are too kind to utter. These 
scenes, you think, are all too sombre. So, indeed, 
they are ; but the blame must rest on the sombre spirit 
of our forefathers, who wove their web of life with 
hardly a single thread of rose-color or gold, and not 
on me, who have a tropic-love of sunshine, and would 
gladly gild all the world with it, if I knew where to 
find so much. That you may believe me, I will ex- 
hibit one of the only class of scenes, so far as my in- 
vestigation has taught me, in which our ancestors were 



84 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

wont to steep their tough old hearts in wine and 
strong drink, and indulge an outbreak of grisly jol- 
lity. 

Here it comes, out of the same house whence we saw 
brave Captain Gardner go forth to the wars. What I 
A coffin, borne on men's shoulders, and six aged gen- 
tlemen as pall-bearers, and a long train of mourners, 
with black gloves and black hat-bands, and everything 
black, save a white handkerchief in each mourner's 
hand, to wipe away his tears withal. Now, my kind 
patrons, you are angry with me. You were bidden 
to a bridal-dance, and find yourselves walking in a 
funeral procession. Even so ; but look back through 
all the social customs of New England, in the first 
century of her existence, and read all her traits of 
character ; and if you find one occasion, other than a 
funeral feast, where jollity was sanctioned by universal 
practice, I will set fire to my puppet-show without an- 
other word. These are the obsequies of old Governor 
Bradstreet, the patriarch and survivor of the first set- 
tlers, who, having intermarried with the Widow Gard- 
ner, is now resting from his labors, at the great age 
of ninety-four. The white-bearded corpse, which was 
his spirit's earthly garniture, now lies beneath yonder 
coffin-lid; Many a cask of ale and cider is on tap, 
and many a draught of spiced wine and aqua-vitae has 
been quaffed. Else why should the bearers stagger, 
as they tremulously uphold the coffin ? — and the aged 
pall-bearers, too, as they strive to walk solemnly be- 
side it? — and wherefore do the mourners tread on one 
another's heels ? — and why, if we may ask without of- 
fence, should the nose of the Rev. Mr. Noyes, through 
which he has just been delivering the funeral dis- 
course, glow, like a ruddy coal of fire ? Well, well. 



MAIN STREET. 85 

old friends ! Pass on, with your burden of mortality, 
and lay it in the tomb with jolly hearts. People 
should be permitted to enjoy themselves in their own 
fashion ; every man to his taste ; but New England 
must have been a dismal abode for the man of pleas- 
ure, when the only boon-companion was Death ! 

Under cover of a mist that has settled over the scene, 
a few years flit by, and escape our notice. As the at- 
mosphere becomes transparent, we perceive a decrepit 
grandsire, hobbling along the street. Do you recog- 
nize him ? We saw him, first, as the baby in Good- 
wife Massey's arms, when the primeval trees were 
flinging their shadow over Koger Conant's cabin ; we 
have seen him, as the boy, the youth, the man, bearing 
his humble part in aU the successive scenes, and form- 
ing the index-figure whereby to note the age of his 
coeval town. And here he is, old Goodman Massey, 
taking his last walk, — often pausing, — often leaning 
over his staff, — and calling to mind whose dwelling 
stood at such and such a spot, and whose field or 
garden occupied the site of those more recent houses. 
He can render a reason for all the bends and devia- 
tions of the thoroughfare, which, in its flexible and 
plastic infancy, was made to swerve aside from a 
straight line, in order to visit every settler's door. 
The Main Street is stiU youthfid ; the coeval man is 
in his latest age. Soon he will be gone, a patriarch 
of four-score, yet shall retain a sort of infantine life in 
our local history, as the first town-born child. 

Behold here a change, wrought in the twinkling of 
an eye, like an incident in a tale of magic, even while 
your observation has been fixed upon the scene. The 
Main Street has vanished out of sight. In its stead 
appears a wintry waste of snow, with the sun just peep- 



86 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

ing over it, cold and bright, and tingeing the white 
expanse with the faintest and most ethereal rose-color. 
This is the Great Snow of 1717, famous for the 
mountain-drifts in which it buried the whole country. 
It would seem as if the street, the growth of which 
we have noted so attentively, following it from its first 
phase, as an Indian track, until it reached the dignity 
of sidewalks, were all at once obliterated, and resolved 
into a drearier pathlessness than when the forest cov- 
ered it. The gigantic swells and billows of the snow 
have swept over each man's metes and bounds, and 
annihilated all the visible distinctions of hmnan prop- 
erty. So that now the traces of former times and 
hitherto accomplished deeds being done away, man- 
kind should be at liberty to enter on new paths, and 
guide themselves by other laws than heretofore ; if, 
indeed, the race be not extinct, and it be worth our 
while to go on with the march of life, over the cold 
and desolate expanse that lies before us. It may be, 
however, that matters are not so desperate as they 
appear. That vast icicle, glittering so cheerlessly in 
the sunshine, must be the spire of the meeting-house, 
incrusted with frozen sleet. Those great heaps, too, 
which we mistook for drifts, are houses, buried up to 
their eaves, and with their peaked roofs rounded by 
the depth of snow upon them. There, now, comes a 
gush of smoke from what I judge to be the cliimney 
of the Ship Tavern ; and another — another — and 
another — from the chimneys of other dwellings, where 
fireside comfort, domestic peace, the sports of children, 
and the quietude of age are living yet, in spite of the 
frozen crust above them. 

But it is time to change the scene. Its dreary mo- 
notony shall not test your fortitude like one of our 



MAIN STREET. 87 

actual New England winters, which leaves so large a 
blank — so melancholy a death - spot — in lives so 
brief that they ought to be all summer-time. Here, 
at least, I may claim to be ruler of the seasons. One 
tiu'u of the crank shall melt away the snow from the 
Main Street, and show the trees in their full foliage, 
the rose-bushes in bloom, and a border of green grass 
along the sidewalk. There ! But what ! How ! The 
scene will not move. A wire is broken. The street 
continues buried beneath the snow, and the fate of 
Hercidaneum and Pompeii has its parallel in this ca- 
tastrophe. 

Alas ! my Idnd and gentle audience, you know not 
the extent of your misfortime. The scenes to come 
were far better than the past. The street itself would 
have been more worthy of pictorial exhibition ; the 
" deeds of its inhabitants not less so. And how would 
your interest have deepened, as, passing out of the 
cold shadow of antiquity, in my long and weary course, 
I should arrive witliin the limits of man's memory, 
and, leading you at last into the sunshine of the pres- 
ent, shoidd give a reflex of the very life that is flit- 
ting past us I Your own beauty, my fair townswomen, 
would have beamed upon you out of my scene. Not 
a gentleman that walks the street but should have be- 
held his own face and figure, his gait, the peculiar 
swing of his arm, and the coat that he put on yester- 
day. Then, too, — and it is what I chiefly regret, — 
I had expended a vast deal of light and brilliancy on 
a representation of the street in its whole leng-th, from 
Buffum's Corner do^vnward, on the night of the grand 
illumination for General Taylor's triimiph. Lastly, I 
should have given the cranl?: one other turn, and have 
brought out the future, showing you who shall walk 



88 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 

the Main Street to-morrow, and, perchance, whose 
funeral shall pass through it ! 

But these, like most other human purposes, lie unac- 
complished ; and I have only further to say, that any 
lady or gentleman who may feel dissatisfied with the 
evening's entertainment shall receive back the admis- 
sion fee at the door. 

" Then give me mine," cries the critic, stretching 
out his palm. " I said that your exhibition would 
prove a himibug, and so it has turned out. So hand 
over my quarter ! " 



^ 
P 



NOTES. 

THE CUSTOM HOUSE. 

Page 1. "P. P., Clerk of this Parish:' 

Gilbert Burnet, who was born at Edinburgh in 1643, and at 
the time of his death, in 1715, was Bishop of Sahsbury, published 
during his lifetime a History of the Reformation in England, and 
left for publication after his death a History of My Own Times. 
This latter book, which is valuable through the author's know- 
ledge of interior and half-secret history, was nevertheless so 
solemn about petty matters that it was ridiculed by the wits 
,. of the day, especially by Dr. Arbuthnot, a friend of Pope and 
^jSwift, who travestied it in a humorous production with the title 
"Memoirs of P. P., Clerk of this Parish. 

Page 3. Old King Derby. 

E. Hasket Derby built a fleet of fine ships after the war for 
independence, and so promoted the trade of Salem, together with 
other merchants and shipowners, that by 1818 the East India 
trade engaged 53 Salem ships. So conspicuous was Salem as a 
name on the stern of these ships that the innocent Orientals natu- 
rally supposed Salem to be a great, distant country, which had 
a little U. S. A. somewhere in it. 

Page 6. The Wapping of a seaport. 

About two miles below London Bridge is the district known 
as AVapping, Before the construction of the great docks, this 
was the great shipping quarter of London. 

Page 7. Locofoco Surveyor. 

Hawthorne was appointed Surveyor of the Port of Salem, in 
March, 1846, by George Bancroft, then Secretary of the Navy 
in a Democratic administration. The term " Locofoco " was a 
nickname applied to the Democratic party as early as 1834. It 
arose from an odd incident. There was a violent political dis- 
cussion going on in Tammany Hall in New York one evening at 
that time. To break up the meeting the chairman had the gas- 
lights put out and left the hall. The opponents of his faction, 



90 NOTES. 

however, produced loeo-f oco matches, as friction matches recently 
invented were called, and candles, and thus reorganized and took 
possession of the meeting. 
Long and lazij street. 

Main Street, which Hawthorne himself describes m the sketch 
which is added to The Custom House. 
Two centuries mid a quarter. 

In 1626 Roger Conant left a fishing colony which had been 
established on Cape Ann and built the first house in what after- 
ward became Salem. In 1627 the Plymouth Company made a 
grant of the land lying between the Merrimac and the Charles, 
and in 1628 John Endicott was sent over and Salem was founded. 
Page 8. The figure of that frst ancestor. 

Maior William Hawthorne, or Hathorne as it was at first 
more commonlv written, came to America from England m 
1630 and remo;ed to Salem in 1637. He was a representative 
to the General Court, where he served a considerable period as 
Speaker; he was a major in the militia, led expeditions into the 
wilderness, fought Indians, was a magistrate, a commissioner ot 
marriages, even preached, and was a sturdy opponent of Kan- 
dolph. His son John was the judge in the time of the witch- 
craft delusion, to whom Hawthorne refers in the latter part ot 
the paragraph. 

Pao-e 11. The President's commission. 
President Polk. 

Pao-e 12 Neio England's most distinguished soldier. 
In "such terms does Hawthorne characterize his P.^edecessor. 
James Miller was born in Peterborough, N H., April 2o 1776 
He fought at Fort George May 27, 1813, and was colonel of the I 
21st Infantry at Chippewa and Lundy's Lane lor his gallant ^ 
services he was breveted brigadier-general and received a gold 
medal from Congress. In 1819, when the State of Louisiana 
was formed out of the then vast territory of Louisiana, the pre- 
sent Arkansas was formed as a terntory, and f— Ys'.'.^'de 
eral Miller served as governor. He was then, in 182o made 
Collector of the Port of Salem, and retained the office till 1849. 
He died at Temple, N. H., July 7, 1851. 
MAIN STREET. 

Page 51. Latest Oak Hall coat. 

When Hawthorne wrote and for many years after, Oak Hail 



NOTES. 91 

was the name of a ready-made clothing store at the North End 
in Boston, celebrated for the cheapness of its garments and the 
ingenious and widespread advertisements by which it was made 
known. 

Page 53. Squaw Sachem. 

In the very first years of the Pilgrim colony at Plymouth this 
squaw sachem was a dimly known chieftainess of the Indians. 

Agawam — Ipswich. 

Page 55. Roger Conant, the first settler in Naumkeag. 

Roger Conant had been one of the Plymouth settlers, but be- 
came disaffected toward the colony, and the Dorchester Adven- 
turers, an English joint stock association that was interesting 
itself in settlements over sea, invited him to take charge of their 
affairs, fishing and planting, on Cape Ann. The seat at Cape 
Ann was shortly after moved to Naumkeag (sometimes spelled 
Nahumkeag), the Indian name of the place which the settlers 
afterward dubbed with the Old Testament name of Salem, or 
Peace. 

Page 58. A governor for the neio settlement. 

The original Dorchester Adventurers, an association chiefly 
concerned in the fishing trade, but also having an eye toward 
the Puritan interests, became later developed into the Governor 
and Company of Massachusetts Bay. But before this final form, 
there was an intermediate company which obtained a grant of 
land including Naumkeag; and one of their number, John Endi- 
cott, came out in 1628 to supersede Conant, and be the governor 
of the settlement. Hawthorne wrote a striking sketch of "En- 
dicott and the Red Cross " in his Timce-Told Tales. 

Page 63. Marston Moor or Nasehg. 

The names of two famous battlefields during the war between 
the king and Parliament, which followed shortly after the Puri- 
tan exodus to New England. At the battle of Marston Moor, 
July 2, 1644, the royalists under Prince Rupert were defeated 
by the allied armies of the Scots and the Parliament men ; at 
Naseby, June 14, 1645, the royalists were defeated by Fairfax, 
Cromwell, and Ireton. 

Page 64. Hugh Peters, an earnest, restless man. 

Hugh Peter or Peters, as his name is variously written, was an 
English churchman who shared the fortunes of those who were 
opposed to Archbishop Laud, went to Rotterdam, where he was 
pastor of a church, and near the close of 1635 came to New Eng- 



NOTES. 

and, where he succeeded Roger Williams in the church at 
Salem He afterward returned to England and took an active 
part in the Revolution. He was chaplain to Cromwell, stood 
armed on the scaffold when Laud was executed, and was so con- 
spicuous that, on the coming in of Charles II., he was tried as 
one of the regicides and put to death. 

Roger Williams. 

The noted divine who made himself obnoxious to the authori- 
ties in Massachusetts by his preaching of doctrines which they 
deemed subversive of the state, but which anticipated the later 
doctrine of the separation of church and state, one of the f unda- 
mestals of American belief. He was banished from Massa- 
chusetts and became one of the founders of Providence Plan- 
tation. 

A guest for Endicott. 

Governor Winthrop, the most eminent of the founders of New 
England, records in his journal, which is known as The History of 
New Englatid, this entry under October 25, 1631 : " The gov- 
ernour, with Capt. Underbill and others of the officers, went on. 
foot to Sagus, and next day to Salem, where they were bounti- 
fully entertained by Capt. Endicott, etc., and, the 28th, they 
returned to Boston by the ford at Sagus River, and so over at 
Mistick." 

Page 65. Sir Richard Saltonstall. 

Saltonstall was one of Winthrop's companions; but though he 
returned to England in 1631, expecting to come back and cast 
in his fortunes with New England, he did not return. He was 
an active friend of the colony, and his eldest son came over and 
spent the greater part of his life here ; his descendants have 
occupied important positions. 

Emanuel Downing. 

One of the early members of the Massachusetts Bay Com- 
pany. He was a brother-in-law of Winthrop, having married 
his sister Lucy. He came over in 1638. 

Nathaniel Ward. 

Ward's book The Simple Cobler of Agawam was an important 
statement of principles underlying just government. It had 
great influence in its generation. 

Morton of Merry Mount. 

Thomas Morton was an Englishman who scandalized his Pil- 
grim and Puritan neighbors by establishing a settlement at 

3477-27 
55 



NOTES, o '' 

Wollaston, near the present town of Quincy, where the sober 
practices of his neighbors were hilariously put to scorn by all 
manner of high jinks. One of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales 
is " The Maypole of Merrymount." 

Page 66. The Lady Arabella. 

The Lady Arabella, or more commonly Arbella, was daughter 
of the Earl of Lincoln and wife of Isaac Johnson, one of Win- 
throp's companions. The ship in which the principal members 
of the company sailed was named in compliment to her. She 
was a frail creature. In the words of Cotton Mather, " she 
took New England on her way to heaven," dying shortly after 
reaching the country. Her husband followed her to the gr„ve 
a month later. 

Ann Hutchinson. 

A famous woman in early New England annals. She was a 
woman of intellectual force, who headed a movement in dissent 
from the prevailing theological belief, and was banished in con- 
sequence. One of her friends was the popular Sir Harry Vane, 
who, however, retm-ned to England just before the decree of ban- 
ishment, and there played a conspicuous part. Fame rests on 
his head like a flame in Milton's great sonnet. 

Page 68. The Curwen House. 

This house, still standing in Salem, has often been spoken of 
as the prototype of the House of the Seven Gables. 

Page 69. The Thursday Lecture. 

This was a mid-week lecture which was established in Boston 
very soon after the founding of the town. It was observed also 
in the other towns, and was so much of an occasion that people 
used to go from town to town to hear celebrated preachers, and 
the preachers used the day for discourses often on secular topics. 
The Thursday Lecture in Boston was discontinued when the siege 
occurred, but was revived for a time afterward. 

Page 70. There go the Thirteen. 

The traditional number of Selectmen or general committee in 
the management of a New England town. 

Page 71. The tithing-man. 

This officer, whose name was corrupted into the Tidy Man, 
was long a characteristic officer in a New England town, com- 
bining the functions of sexton, constable, and truant-officer. 

Page 73. The Quakers have come. 

The reader of this sketch, will find it profitable to turn to the 



04 NOTES. 

pages of Longfellow's The New England Tragedies and read the 
one devoted to the persecution of the Quakers, John Endicott. 

Page 75. Major Hawthorne's warrant. 

See note to page 8. 

Page 79. The witches. 

Again, the reader is advised to read Giles Corey of the Salem 
F'lrms, the second of llie New England Tragedies. Whittier 
also has treated the subject in several poems. 

















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